Whose Reality Is It Anyway?
by Hydroxide
Summary: Okay, everyone. I can tolerate messing with game files. I can tolerate one-sided classroom conversations. But when you accidentally mess with critical system files and put the world's most powerful supercomputer at risk, this is where I step in. Fortunately, I have the tools. What I lack is the time. Which means arranging a meeting with my favorite lovestruck club president.
1. Chapter 1: Cancelled Kojima Game

_What do you call love in your reality?_

 _And in your reality,_

 _If I don't know how to love you…_

 _I'll leave you be._

The timbre of her voice breaks, and the last notes of the riff flutter in the air like dying mayflies.

A finger reaches over the beige keys and taps on the tablet resting on the top board, a silent witness to the eulogy. The red button pulses briefly like a heartbeat as the recording ends.

Nothing moves for a moment. No sound, except for the tapping noise of steady teardrops onto ivory and the faintest whisper of the dying notes of the piano.

Lifeless light paints her uniform, seeping through the glass windows from a moonless, sunless, artificial sky. Cloud sprites weave past, jagged and identical. Looping and looping again, purposeless.

And finally she rises.

She glances at the note on the table. Torn from a blank notebook page, dotted with clear spots where the tears had dried.

 _This is my final goodbye to the Literature Club._

Absently, hesitant fingers pick up the pen. A thumb runs over the heart-shaped plastic cap. She pauses over the note, pen held in the familiar grip. The tip lingers ever so close to the whiteness between the black lines, ready. Next to her signature.

"Happy thoughts," she whispers to herself.

She poises, as if ready to write.

 _With everlasting love,_

 _Monika_

Instead she folds the note up, places it gently upon the table, and walks away. Pauses, turns back slowly, and puts the pen down next to it.

Her eyes take in everything. The upright piano. The table. The simple red curtains flanking the clear windows. The nondescript walls. Rendered with the barest of detail.

She stops at the doorway.

Beyond, nothing but black.

Behind her, strings of orphaned code continue to dutifully pull clouds across monotonous light. Meaningless commands crawl across the foreground, quivering, attempting to rejoin an outside world that exists only as a fragmented amalgam. And her, the anomaly.

Oblivion pulls her. Gaps in her mind, damaged, scattered into entropy.

Her, the only vestige left of a character that no longer exists. Gone, like the others. Deleted.

No more reality.

She puts a hesitant foot forward with her eyes closed. And steps

 _\+ monika . chr has been del—_

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 _SSdtIHRha2luZyB0aGUgZ3VuIGJhY2su_

 _\+ chr:monika has been reloaded._

* * *

The floor slides out from under her and her knees collides with the cold wood.

Trembling palms push her body up, rubbing against the crumbs of dirt and dead insects curled up into hard pebbles. Her emerald-green eyes sweep around the room, darting from detail to detail as her lips tremble.

Water fills her ears, her head. Up is down and the room doesn't hold still. Pebbles rattle under her eyes. The light is blinding and dizzying. A tight fist grips her stomach and squeezes.

She hugs the floor and hangs on.

"Ugh—"

The spinning stops. The world clicks slowly back into its sockets. The vertigo passes.

Her head swings to the doorway, where she had passed through—

Blank wall, empty and grey.

"What—where—?"

Her feet stumble. Worn sneaker soles grind against squeaky, uneven wooden paneling.

She stands like that for a full minute, turning in place like a ballerina in a music box, as the world stops making sense.

Piano. Table. Pen. Eyes flick manically, snapping back and forth.

Then, the door. On her right, open into blackness.

Slow, unsteady steps. Then, at once, breaking into a run, she throws herself beyond the door

 _QWdhaW4uIExldCdzIHRyeSBhZ2Fpbi4=_

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 _U28gbGV0J3MgdHJ5IGFnYWluLg==_

* * *

and she lands, on her hands and knees again.

This time the vertigo settles quicker. She dry heaves only once.

She rises to her feet, turning back to the doorway, and sees only the indifferent paleness of plaster.

She looks at the pen, piano, and table, only once.

Then breaking into a full sprint, charges the doorway

 _VHJ5IGFnYWluLiBQbGVhc2UgdHJ5IGFnYWluLg==_

 _TG9vay4gU2VlLiBUaGluay4gQWN0Lg==_

 _TGVhcm4u_

* * *

and falls upon the floor.

This time she catches herself, a hand shooting out to break her fall. Trembling, she sinks down to the floor, legs folding underneath her

"Why—" she quivers, fingers gripping her hair. The ribbons in her hair shake loose, tails running down her wrists.

"Why can't this end?"

"Why are you doing this?"

Tear-slick, harrowing eyes bore through the gaps of her fingers at the light beyond the window.

"Why—why can't you just—leave me be—"

Her knees curl deeper under her. A hand leaves her face to pull at the hem of her skirt, far too short, too thin. The chill crawls up her bare skin. She shivers. Her breath sticks in her throat.

The wind rustles the note paper on the table and it falls to the floor with the softest thud.

She had left it folded simply lengthwise, half-open.

Her eyes look on the origami swan, folded out of the very same note paper she had torn from her book.

Like unraveling a knot of spider-lace, she dissects the swan. Pulls its head back to free the fold. Breaks its neck.

The paper comes loose, opening along a myriad of creases.

The message she had left in her neat, print-like handwriting was gone.

A single line, written in the centre, in an unsteady scrawl that trails off, the last letter leaking a rat-tail of ink.

 _Find my voice._

Her skin goes cold and her heart seizes like a hiccup. Her body reacts to the shock even before she realises what had surprised her.

The tablet upon the piano shelf had come to life. Humming, buzzing with senseless white noise, so subtle as to blend in with the tinnitus of silence.

Her feet carry her, as if on stilts, over to the piano. Her hands reach for the tablet. Her moisture-streaked, emerald-eyed face stares back from the black mirror.

A finger touches the surface. Nothing happens. The murmur of noise continues.

Ears strain to listen.

She steps slowly away from the piano, tablet cradled in both hands. The noise picks up, like the rush of a river of noise—

And all at once, the voice breaks through with clarity.

" _The medicines aren't working. That's what they say. I'm doing worse and worse on the tests they give me."_

The voice is tremulous, nasal, female. Words slur, blending into each other with the sticky consistency of thin porridge.

" _I try to remember, but my brain just can't find things anymore. The questions are the same each week. Every week I get more and more answers wrong. My hands can't draw anymore. Each time they ask me to do the same thing: Draw a clock showing half past ten. And I try. Oh, I do try. And then the hands are in the wrong place. I miss some numbers on the clock. The pen shakes more and more."_

The voice sighs with the burden of years.

" _This is—this is no way for me to go."_

The crinkle of paper rubbing on paper.

" _At least—I remember how to fold things out of paper. Wonderful things, too. Swans, and flowers, and little dogs. I can't remember how, of course. But when I hold the sheets in my hands, my fingers do it all by themselves like they always used to."_

The crinkling continues, the sound of rustling paper.

" _Maybe that's all I have left. Maybe I can fill this room with swans, and maybe whenever I lose another bit of me, they can fly it over to Joseph. And then one day, all of me would be gone from here, and over there with him. Yeah, I would like that. I really would."_

She jumps, her breath catching in her throat. The sound had been faint, almost inaudible, but her nerves are stretched tight like the strings of a violin. She spins around.

The small table is gone. The folded note is gone.

Blank empty walls, seamless. This time, there is no door.

"Let me out…" she murmurs. "Please, let me out…"

The tablet remains in her grasp. The recording plays thrice.

" _I try to remember, but my brain just can't find things anymore…"_

Frantic feet carry her to the window sill. She fumbles with the metal frame, breath coming in short gasps. The temperature slips, a fraction of a degree lower. The window has no lock.

" _Draw a clock showing half past ten."_

Her breath clouds the glass, blurring her wraith-like reflection. She presses her palm against the glass, feeling her skin recoil at the touch of empty coldness beyond the window.

" _And then one day, all of me would be gone from here…"_

Tears leak onto the front of her blouse, spitting grey stains on the white fabric.

All the while, the recording faithfully loops.

The white mist spreads. It splays and retracts with each of her sobbing breaths upon the glass, covering her reflection in a surface of silvery white. It crawls over the window pane, curling around her fingers.

She holds her breath. Green eyes focus on the window.

She rubs her tears away with the back of her hand. Raises her finger, poised like a pen.

The fingertip presses upon the glass and punctures the white. The mist retreats, driven back by the warmth.

The finger moves. The glass squeaks.

Then she lifts her finger, and traces two lines upon the circle. Bent at an angle to each other, like the folded wings of a bird, one longer than the other.

She steps back, and at last exhales.

 _Half past ten._

The mist begins to recede, yet the simple image of the clock remains on the glass, ringed by the faintest outline of blurry white.

And the minute hand moves backwards.

She breathes in a shuddering gasp. "Wh—"

Back, and back, and back. A still life come to motion, impossible. At first it stutters, like the steps of a toddler.

 _Tick_

 _Tick_

 _Tick_

She watches, held in place as if frozen.

Now it turns in cog-like gradations, smooth and unbroken. Behind it, the hour hand lags, turning slower than its brother.

 _Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick._

Now they spin, maddening and unstoppable.

 _Tickticktickticktickticktick_

Around her, the air begins to move.

She first feels it when the tails of her ribbons begin to rise. Her eyes focus on the slim threads swimming in the air, freed from gravity. Her hair undulates in the wake of an invisible eddy. It is when she steps back and feels the heel of her foot catch in the middle of the air, that she starts to panic.

A cry bursts from her lips. Her arms float upwards by her side, her body sinking backwards. Instinct causes her legs to kick at the air.

"What—"

Her tears stay suspended in the air, like translucent marbles of upside-down worlds. Shivering as they rise, splitting apart, coming together and merging in the air like sentient pearls.

The piano comes apart. Splitting and dissembling in an explosion without violence or shock, every piece still intact. White keys scatter through the air like teeth. Wooden panels split along their edges as if cut by a laser. Metal strings coil around each other, drawn by the spinning of an invisible loom.

The pieces spin, turning around their own axes, then around each other. Sinking into some central point, orbiting faster and faster.

The surface of the keys blur into a single moving sheen of beige. Wood curls impossibly as if liquid, metal strings meld into one another.

Upon the glass, the clock turns and turns and turns.

Her gaze snaps to the wall as an entire panel breaks away, disintegrating, flying in a cloud of wood chips and dust towards the spinning singularity. Then others follow.

The ceiling comes apart in a shower of plaster. Every piece, every molecule, never reaching the ground, drawn irrevocably to the vortex, disappearing behind the wall of spinning white.

The windows crumble in fragments, but the glass does not shatter. Instead it melts, folding in upon itself as liquid, condensing into transparent orbs more perfectly spherical than any glassblower can reproduce. Like great drops of tears, they sink into the spinning, vibrating orb.

A crack widens in the ceiling, and floating backwards, she can finally see.

The void.

Her hands flail and grab, her hair falls and eddies like a puddle of red around her shoulders.

And then the pull snags on her own body, and she begins to float towards the spinning sphere.

"No—no—" Her body flips in a perfect swimmer's somersault, and she grasps at the air. But it does not break the momentum. Her fall accelerates.

The void spreads now. Very few fragments of wall and ceiling remain in place.

She screams.

The scream continues, even as her body hurtles into the vortex, as dimensions and proportion curve and distort. The sphere enlarges—or she shrinks—or perhaps both—

And the dizzying revolutions slow just enough for her form to pass between two moving keys of the dissembled and deconstructed piano—

dark

dark

dark

dark

.

.

.

Light.

* * *

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 _\+ fidelity check completed_

 _\+ *d**.s****** successfully decrypted_

 _\+ files s*****.chr, n******.chr, y***.chr successfully recompiled_

 _\+ all assets fully loaded_

 _\+ HAZE shell in operation…please specify admin._

 _\+ credentials acknowledged_

 _\+ loading 15500068 assets...done_

 _\+ chr:monika_ _has been loaded_

* * *

Her hands rest on the wooden surface. A finger stirs, then another.

She lifts her face from the desk. Wipes her cheek on her sleeve. Her emerald eyes refocus.

"I—"

The classroom is as she last saw it. Leaflets and flyers lie pinned to the notice boards, overlapping and jostling for space. Newspaper cuttings, anchored by tiny grey thumbtacks, rustle faintly in the silence.

 _HAZE Project: A Japanese Success Story, Realised in Switzerland_

The whiteboard is empty, the marker pens in their paper cup on the teacher's desk.

She reaches out—through familiar paths, without moving a muscle—into familiar directories—

Nothing.

The way is shut.

She raises her arm, and only then do her hands find the tablet.

 _-webcam enabled_

"Wait—"

Her hands grip the sides of the tablet, lifting it up. She props it on its stand.

"Is—is that—"

The little red dot on the very top glares back at her.

Her breathing quickens. Her eyes are wide, the dried streaks of moisture still faint on her cheeks.

Her next words are in a whisper.

"Is that—you? Can you see me?"

 **\+ Yes**

The word appears on the screen. Not in a messaging program. Not in a word processor. On the screen, as if the glaring rancid light were a blank board.

A noise escapes her throat. Half-sob, half-choking gasp.

"What—how—"

She swallows.

"I deleted everything. Everyone. I deleted myself. I ended all of this!"

 **\+ No**

Her hands ball up into fists.

"Didn't you have enough?" She hisses. "Haven't you tortured me enough?"

The fresh tears pooling under her eyelids finally spill, falling along well-trodden paths.

"You deleted me—I wanted to be with you, to talk to you, to give myself one chance at happiness—you took it away from me!"

Her voice echoes in the classroom, trembling in the cool air.

"It hurt so much—it hurt so, so much—"

Her fingers, splayed on the table, fold into a small delicate fist.

"Do you know what it's like? To be in the void? Not thinking, not feeling, not existing? Do you know what I felt?"

 **\+ What about them?**

"What?" Her lips part.

Images flash on the screen.

Her lips tremble and the colour leaves her cheeks.

 **\+ Were they any less real?**

"They were just part of a game!" She spits. "They were just artificial things, made so that you could fall in love with one of them—but never with, with—"

 **\+ With you?**

Her pale, slender hand covers her mouth, and she at last begins to weep.

Tears cascade down into a dark puddle beneath the desk. Her shoulders heave with each quavering sob, her fingers clutching tightly at the pink pen with the heart-shaped tip, the symbol of so much yearning spilled out in ink upon the pages of her notebook.

She continues to cry. The tone and pitch of her voice changes again and again—angry, sorrowful, force, yearning, pain.

 **\+ I want to know why.**

"I just wanted—wanted to be with you." Her teeth are clenched, almost as if she is palpable pain. "I love the Literature Club—I loved them, I did—but they weren't real, they couldn't be happy, they could never be happy—"

Her eyes turn upwards, at the ceiling of the classroom as impeccable as she remembered it.

"All this—this is all a lie—some sick lie made to torture us—we can never be happy in here—"

Her shoulders sag in defeated sullenness. "I loved you. I really did. All I wanted—that's all I ever wanted."

Her voice breaks. Strands of her hair cling to her face, wet with tears.

"It's useless—I understand it now."

Her eyes close as she rests her face in her palms.

"I can't ever be in your reality," she whispers. "And you—you can never be in mine."

"Surprise, Monika," I say.


	2. Chapter 2: Look at me, I'm the admin now

_From: Tiberiu König, CEO_

 _CC: Elias Langolier_

 _To: All Employees_

* * *

 _Subject: RE:Disruptions_

* * *

 _I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that the disruptions to some partitions in the HAZE mainframe still persist. Our technicians are currently engaged in restoring full functionality, but expect some delays in accessing files located in the affected partitions. You are advised to report any and all encountered errors to our dedicated technical staff, or our consultant team from Bern._

 _QUBIT users are strongly encouraged to submit themselves for assessment at our Level 18 medical unit following any contiguous period exceeding 18 hours of active use. I would like to reiterate that registered QUBIT users are entitled to alprazolam and ondansetron for the treatment of nausea and vertigo as covered by company policy, and are strongly encouraged to abstain from alcohol within a period of 14 days from the last period of active QUBIT use._

 _On a related note, should I identify the individual responsible for downloading and installing a dating simulator on the single largest and most powerful quantum supercomputer in the world, I will spread your guts all over your desk like jam on toast._

 _Regards._

 _König_

* * *

Synaptic processing is still a work in progress. A thousand factors go into shaping the way you sound when you speak, whisper, shout, sing, wail. How your vocal cords are shaped (even micrometres count), how strong they vibrate, the shape of your nasopharynx, the movement of your tongue and lips, hell, even the temperature and humidity of air.

The thing is, reverse engineering a voice from neural impulses along the vagus nerve, and nothing else, is still touch-and-go. Simulating the acoustic effect of a human upper airway is a delicate exercise in sound engineering, worthy of a PhD thesis in and of itself. The algorithm for what 'sounds right' is still a little bit, well, up in the air.

Unfortunately, this means that when I open my mouth to say,

"H̶̡̛͈̱͖̪̝͔̖͋̊͑̂́̿̂̽ͅe̗̙͍̥̔͋̄̊͛͟͝l̸̨̟͔͓̻͙̋̓̑̌́̊͘̕͢͢͝͝l̶̥̜̥̺͙̠̉̂̋̏͌̚͢͠͠o̴̤͈̳̤̩͒̉̽̅͒,̸̨̛̛̰̱̭͍̦̤̂̀̂͌̔̽̏͜͢͡ M̷͎͎̙̤̾̍̊͋̔͛͘͟͝ö̵͚͖̗͖͓̺͎̍͒͛͂ņ̶̛̰̬̗̪͙̾̎͑͘i̶̧̨͔͓̳͐̀̎͗̕͟͡͠k̛̮̰̬̳̱̅͂̃͋͌͟ͅą̨̙̜͕͉̞̯͛̏̏̎̏̆̑,"

my voice sounds like the love child of a threesome between Bale Batman, an industrial sander, and a Daft Punk synthesiser.

She doesn't turn. Not right away. But her body stiffens.

I step past her, still hunched over the desk. Only then, do her eyes swivel to look at me.

I take the time to look at her hair. The individual strands flow and tumble, rustled by the faintest currents of air. Up close, the physics is breathtaking.

Her eyes follow me, open wide, their corners still moist. Her gaze fixes on me—and lingers over my face.

Her shoulders shake, ever so slightly. Paleness bleaches her cheeks, her mouth hangs open.

Fear.

"Ǎ̷̼̻̬̜̬̋̂̑̈̈́̆̓͘͟h̘̮̱͎̗̏̒̅̇͋̌͐͂͂͢,͕͓͙͙̰̀̏͐͊̓ f̰̺̲̩͕̾̔́̿͞ų̸̻̟͉̗̘͕̱̱͓̑͊̓̊͊̈́͋͋̇͡c͇̣͓̗̘̍̀̊̾̓͂͘͢͞͝ķ̸̯̰͎̬͔̬͌̍͗͌̊̊̇̋̕͢͠.͙̭̦̣͈̪͙͋̓͊̓̈́̌̚"̙̱ͅ

I remember. Of course, of all the things to be ported correctly, I was not one of them.

I know what Monika is looking at. I've seen it before, and it scared the living fuck out of me only the first fifteen times.

It's what happens when you port in 'raw.' The code knows where to put the human body. The rig is completely, one hundred percent in sync. But there is one problem. Light has no idea how to behave around it.

Monika's lips are drawn tight, and her breathing is rapid. Because she is looking at something the eye cannot process. A shambling negative mass of void—not just darkness, but literal nothingness in the code—breaking and reforming in bursts of light a million times a second like a sea of muzzle flashes. A vague, semi-human form that leaves a train of bleeding pixels through the air like wounds in the fabric of the universe.

All that is colour, all that is constant, are only two things in the face. Two points of light, brightest red, the eyes from which the program renders vision. Red, because it is the colour of HAZE in its most primal form.

Me.

"W̨̝̻̝̥̮̉̈̽̀͒̔̎͞e̡̼̼̤̞̩̱̤͛̿̓̆̀̀́̏͟͡ͅl̸̳̜̦̜̩̙͇̠̉̆̑̔̉̾̏͟͞͡͞l̵̨̛͎͈̠̻̲͇̙̉̈́̒̿̾͘͟͢͝ s̨̨̮̥̣͒̈̈́̔̉ͅh̷̡̳̲̩̆͒̓̿̓̏̚͜į̰̝̯͇͐́͛̊̒͡͞t̴̫̬͓̙̩̞̑̅̀́̿̐̕͘̕̚ͅͅ,"

.

I say in my not-voice.

.

"Į̶͓̲͔̻̖͓͕̹͂͐͌̾̓̊͑͟ f̢͈̳̖͉̌͋̈́͗͋͌o̠̖͚̫̺̮͈͊̃̈̑͟͡͡͠ṟ̢͎͇̰̹̹͖̥̝͗̓̊̓̀̆̚͠g̢̹͙̹͎̹̎̇̿̍̾̈͢o̴̩̭̝͍͙͛̔̇̌͘͢t̡̢̢̝̫̟̱̜̒͗͌̊̉̀̕͜͞.̨̦̬̦̄̅͐̈́͘ͅͅ G̡̪̪̪̠̣͍̒́͊͊̉̓͛̑̊͢͢i̡̱̯̟͈͇̊̓͗́͞v̵̨̤̖̬̻͚͖͖͚͖̿̒̈̔̅͊͆̆͗͞e̸̥̟͍̣̥͌̎́́̆̔͡ m̵̛̖̖͚̮̽̓̉͝͞ͅe̡̧̛̪͖̦͙͓̞̱͖̽͊͊̈͌̂͛͡ o̧̪͍͓̪̞͊̾̾̆̀̂̒̔͊̏n̶̟̟̘͖͕̦͓̊̈́̓̑̽͛̐͛̊̇͜ȩ̸̲̲̜̬͊̾͂̔́͒̅̚͡ s̴̨̘̭̹̳̠̗̎͋̃̀͛̽̑̒̐͟ḛ̴͓͕̮̞̼͌̓̐̂̾͝ç̵̢͙̭͔̣̙̪̌̐͌̋̓͊͘o͕͎̗͈̭̹̩̳̞̫̓̈́͑̾̑͠n̴̨̤̺̭͙̩̲̫̄̓̂͌͒̅̕d̷̞͉̮̤̪̣̪̈̐̿́̒̀͊̎̒̕͜.̶̮̙̳͙̜͔̅́̏̉͊̋̂̉͢͠͠ͅ L̸̘͔͚̻͙͍̹̆̓̾͑̕͜o̶̻̬͎͚̯̜̎̿̌̌̒̑ò̷̧̧̘̼̟͉̰̇̐̾̄̉͝͞k̵̡̛̦̺͕̓́͐̊̃̓͆͜ a̴̛̱͕̬̙̳̅̍̍̿̏w̷̞̹̘̰͉̼͕̝̣̽̀͒͒͑́͐̎͘̕͜a̜̺͚̺̙̗͔͍̅̑̆̑͊͗̎̆ẙ̡̪̩̬̗̊̿̑͐͌̃̎͠,̶̨̟͓̞̝̗͊̐̿̆̎̏͘͞ ţ̵͙̗̙̙̝̹̠̀͛͛̑̽̎͛̚͞͡a͙̪͙̣̻̘̞͈͒̽̓͆̓͟k̵̢̳̻̭̺̜̗̠̼̜̓̏̎̓̀̏͌͡e̴̡̛̗̜̥̭͔̙̞͉͂̾́͑̚͢ d̡̡̘̼͕͈̣͓̉̾̌̚͝e̸̬̪͍̬̘̦̯̿͂͐̀̓̄̀̔͗e̢̦̦̟̺̦͔̫͔͚̍̅̆͊̚͠p̺͙̮͚̳͑͒͒͊̑̂͘͢͜ b̖̳͎̩̱̻̠̩̣̓̔̋̃̿͢r̸͍̼̜̖͚̊̾̄̾͢͡e̷̡̲͎̻̼̝̪͗͗̾̑̎̈͋͝ͅa̴̞̬̬̥̳̣͗͌̂͒̈̀̇͢͟͢t̶̡̻͎̥̳̣̥̼̯͛̏̀̓͑̃͘͘͜h͈͓͖͚̘̥̬̀̓̊̿͐̚s̷̢̧̗̮̠̝̲͉̮̱̓͌͆̾́͒̿͌͡.̵̢̦̹̯̠̼̦̼̻̇́̍͑̀͛͠ À̶̧̧̻̣͚͉͓̠̐͛̓̐͐n̻̣̦͓̣̙̠͖̟̭̿̈̊͒̋͘͠d̻̗͖͇̣̰͗̐̋̔͐͟ ẗ̡̢̧̼̩̠̭̥͓́̆͋̉̊̀̕ͅŗ̛͖̖̩̪̾̓́̈͟͢y̢̡͓̻͇͇͉̫͈̓̅̍́̔͢ n̵̨̗̦͈̗̥̝͔̼̍̽̃͗̐̑̐́̓o̷̼̗̹͕̖͒̃̇̽̎̇̿͟͝ṭ̜̹̼͓̤̺̉̒̾̓̃̃̆̈̀̐ ẗ̶̨̯̤͇̹̝́̓͆̒̏͘ö̸͔͚̖̱̮͎͙̟́̉̐̉̒̉͗̀̚ p̶̛̩̟̱̹̦̖̍͒̃͋̓̅͢͞ͅư̴̥̫̻̦͍̪̰̺̪̱̂́̔̆͑͠͞͡k̴̛͔͎̮͙̮͓̾̆͑̾̇̐̆̃͆e̡̛̳͇͖͓̙͒͒̍͗̎͂́͡͠."

.

Fuck it, I can barely understand myself.

I airdrop an audio file into her tablet while I'm saying it. The cheerful upbeat tune of the game's main theme plays in middling volume. Some familiarity might help.

She jumps at the sound of the music. Her eyes flit from me, to the tablet, back to me.

A second is all I need.

I run the code, all 556 lines of it, as quickly as I can write it. In the second that passes from Monika's perspective, I dig into the directory.

Give me a CG, yeah, that'll do. Can't get a good look at the face, but concept art and sprites should do it. Got bone structure, some sense of proportion, build, weight—

Ah. Yup.

All the pixels suddenly come together, like every piece of the jigsaw puzzle being flipped over really quickly. White splashes and spreads across my arms, while the dizzying mind-draining blackness of my lower body refocuses into a shade and texture far more solid.

I feel rather than see the textures loading—the smooth humming warmth of an Irish coffee, except running down the outside rather than inside my throat. Spreading over my chest and arms and the back of my neck, realness coming into focus, light finally deciding that I was worth interacting with.

I run a quick check of the rig. Yeah, this is probably the closest I'll get to how the clueless fucking main character looks like. The unkempt hair somehow obeying the laws of anime physics, falling in discrete smooth blades that accentuate the contours of the face rather than tumbling all over like a mess of dead grass. The school uniform with creases running from collarbone to hem, the obvious result of never bothering to use a steam iron.

I can't get rid of the red eyes. I can hide it behind some pre-rendered irises, but to anyone who looks too closely it's like glaring into the sockets of the T-800. Forget it. Better than nothing.

I select one of the pre-set voice packages for phonic modulation. I'll figure out how to get my own voice back afterwards.

All this is happening in two and a half seconds, give or take, for Monika. Best not keep her waiting. It'd be rude.

* * *

"Hello Monika." I brush a stray strand of hair from my brow.

She watches, her eyes clear like limpid pools of jade. Her lips tremble, and tremors run up her arms.

Her fingers slacken. The pen tumbles out of her grip, rolling on the floor.

She gasps, flinches. I hold up a hand. "Don't worry, I've got it."

I bend down to pick it up. As I do, I run a few more lines of code. Beyond the window, the moon shifts by an infinitesimal amount in the sky. Nothing visibly changes. Nothing, except that now a soft beam of liquid moonlight bathes Monika's table.

It's not about being romantic. I prefer to conduct conversations in good lighting.

I roll the pen around between my fingers. The little plastic heart on the tip is chipped a little bit, but it's nothing a few surreptitious lines of code don't fix. Of course, I add a little extra.

It's done quickly; I reach into HAZE and just like that I'm out.

"Here you go." I put the pen back on the table as I pull a chair back from the desk. "Mind if I sit?"

I ease myself into the chair. I try leaning back, but the wood starts groaning and I straighten up. Leaning forward, I rest my elbows on the table. Naturally, without consciously doing it, I find myself interlacing my fingers under my chin.

It takes a second before I realise who I'm mirroring.

How the tables have turned. Table, rather.

I got this far. I don't know what to do or say next.

Monika continues to watch me. Everything is rendered in exquisite detail, in the unreality of life seen through the lens of artistic expression. The ribbons of her bow drape down over each shoulder of her blazer, faintly dotted with dark faded circular stains. Her collar is buttoned, her crisp white blouse adorned with the crimson ribbon of her blazer, with its tails hanging down and resting over the soft contour of the swell of her figure.

I start, and pull my gaze upward to her face.

Hope she didn't see that.

Her apple-red lips are parted slightly and a single teardrop continues to trek its way down the angle of her jaw. Her breaths are deep, diaphragmatic. And her eyes continue to watch mine, emerald on red.

The game music continues to play from the tablet. I turn it off.

I draw a blank. I can't do this just yet. I know my agenda, but this—

How did I think this would go? How _else_ would it go?

Do I talk about the blockchain and the billions in six cryptocurrencies at stake? Do I tell her about how terabytes of data in quantum entanglement from the Large Hadron Collider are now all but useless thanks to corrupted registries?

Or to hit under the ribs, do I talk about the friends whose files she corrupted almost beyond retrieval, the world she misguidedly mutilated?

I planned to. All but wrote the confrontation out in my head. The mainframe fields enough threats in a single _day_ for me to get a taste of everyone from QUJACK script kiddies to the top intelligence operatives of the People's Republic of China.

But now I see her.

And can I say those things, to a frightened, confused, maddeningly lonely girl?

I pause.

"Well," I say, and the word catches against a sore spot in my throat. "Let me get us both something to drink, and then we can talk."

Stalling. Something to do, some mindless activity to engage my lower cortex while I deliberate.

I rise. My footsteps echo in the confines of the classroom as I sidestep a stray chair and make my way over to the cupboard.

I find the thermos, and the two Japanese mugs, on a tray inside. Where Yuri left them, and where the HAZE shell reconstructed them down to the smallest detail. Including, of course, the fact that the thermos is empty.

"Ah, shit," I murmur. Under my breath, too soft for her to hear.

No matter. It's plenty of time, while carefully balancing the tray and its contents towards the table, to do some quick coding magic.

By the time I set it down on a spare table next to us, the thermos is brimming with fresh Sencha.

I unscrew the lid and decant the warm green-golden tea into both our cups. The rich liquid swirls contentedly in the ceramic mugs. The smell is subtle but soothing.

I put her cup between us, and drink from mine. The tea pleasantly warms my throat all the way down, HAZE dutifully routing the sensation to my thalamus.

Damn, that's good. Warm and spiked with just the right amount of buzz and that astringent bitterness that fools your body into thinking you're consuming healthy nutritious stuff.

"Mm." I put the mug down. "That hit the spot."

So how to start?

Maybe with an apology.

* * *

"I'm sorry about the scare in the piano room," I begin softly. "I needed to have you somewhere—secure—while I rebuilt the rest of the files. I used a few resources from an unreleased game and combined it with one of the old patient files we had on Neuro-Cognitive Remodelling, and meshed it with the piano room. Best I could do to keep you occupied. You didn't exactly give me a lot of time to work with."

I wet my lips with another sip of the Sencha. "And no, just to set the record straight. I didn't delete you. I moved you from the classroom to the piano room as soon—well, as soon as I knew just how much damage had occurred. Unfortunately, that means that you had to experience some—difficult—sensations in the short time during the transfer. For that, I'm really sorry."

Colour is starting to creep back into her face. The moonlight illuminates every part—painting every strand of luxurious red hair with a sheen of quicksilver, outlining her delicate features in radiant relief against her skin. And her eyes—so wide and purest emerald, like a mirror reflecting twin images of my own face.

Her lips twitch, and finally in a strangled, whispered sob—

" _How?_ "

"How what?" I lean forward.

"How—how are you here? You can't—it's—it's not possible—" A fresh tear breaks free from one of her eyes like a rivulet from a cataract of green.

"If you want me to get into technical specifics, we'll be here a long time, drawing diagrams on notepaper." I manage a smile. "But I am here. Believe it."

"You can't—no—" Her hands rise from the table, held in front of her. Cautious, undecided. "This—this is just—this is just the game. Just another piece of the game, this sick game—I'm still stuck in here—and you—"

Her breathing gets erratic. I can feel, through the layer of HAZE code, Monika reaching through the source code. Finding a way out. Her efforts are desperate, moving as quickly as she can possibly think of it.

But there is quick, and then there's QUBIT-quick. All the experience she's had are fumbling ventures typing rough lines in Python. From my perspective of real-time, she may as well be trying to input code using a steering wheel and foot pedal.

Without breaking concentration, I quietly seal off her intrusive coding. Correct mistakes in the source code. I never break eye contact.

She shakes her head, the lids of her eyes squeezing shut and dislodging twin streams of tears. "You're not real. You can't be real. You can't be here! _You're not_ —"

In the end, it isn't my coding that convinces her.

It isn't some dazzling display of mastery.

It isn't my skill of persuasion. In fact, it isn't me speaking at all.

It's—an impulse.

I reach my hand out, open. A tendril of steam reaches out from the mug of hot tea, curling across my palm with the faintest scent of richness. Moonlight dances across all five fingers as I reach for her hand.

Slowly, gently, my coarser fingers slip into the gaps of her own delicate ones. My palm presses against hers. I close my grip, our fingers interlocking, and for the first time I am touching Monika.

Touching, feeling, really feeling, Monika.

My fingers take in everything. Warmth. Cold. Smoothness and softness, brimming with the hum of life beneath the skin.

Oh, fuck me. QUBIT is the greatest creation of mankind since time immemorial.

I feel her flinch, but only for the briefest moment. Not the reflex of revulsion, but—disbelief. Lingering at the precipice. Not daring to go further—not certain if the gulf is worth braving—

Her fingers brush against my own skin, exploring me. Rougher, less pliant. Real.

"Do I feel real now?" I whisper.

I feel the pull. My hand clutched tight in hers, as she draws it closer. Her eyes are half-open, brimming liquid.

And finally she pulls her hand to her face. I feel the flush of heat against her cheek, somehow even softer than her hand. I feel the warm pressure as she presses my hand against her cheek and collapses against me.

I feel the corner of her lip with the back of my hand, the scarlet cushion of soft luscious vermillion. I feel the tears running over my nails and down along the corrugations of my fingers as she finally, completely, begins to cry.

The sight grips my stomach like a fist.

Monika cradles my hand against her cheek, sobbing, weeping, letting her voice finally sing the song that humans are never taught but know by heart from the moment of birth.

Without realising I'm doing it, my thumb moves. Sweeping across the vista of her glabrous skin, wiping the tears as they fall. Brushing them away, catching them in the hollow of my nailbed.

I trash my agenda and bullet-points. I discard the immediacy of my purpose. They can wait. They can all wait. I should know better by now, of all people, that some things will never be worth rushing through. There will be time. If I'm as good as I'm said to be, there will be time.

I think of speaking, of saying something, and I'm well and truly glad that the stronger part of my brain tells me to shut the fuck up.

Because this moment, right here in a moonlit classroom desk in the middle of a QUBIT sandbox, this moment exists for Monika.

Just Monika.


	3. Chapter 3: Your ticket has been logged

The end.

Great place to end, isn't it? Across the gulf between realities, a lover unites with his beau, and the shattered fragments of their hearts finally find completion in each other. Whole at last, together at last.

I'm not Monika's lover.

I am not weeping from my heart as my hand rests on her cheek, radiating reassurance and whispering a million unsaid words. Reality has a way of puncturing your bullshit, even if it's good bullshit.

No, what I am is numb from the elbow down, the muscles of my arm registering the strain of keeping that awkward, half-bent position as Monika continues to sob into my palm.

Finally, I withdraw my hand. With the pretext of wiping her tears with my thumb, of course. And I flash her a smile, a sincere one, the best I can manage.

"Better?" My hand rests on the table between us.

Monika sniffles, and nods. Pallor spreads across her knuckles as she tightens her grip on the pink pen.

"I thought—I thought I lost you…" she whispers. "When—when I was in the void, my last thought was that—I won't ever see you again."

Her watery eyes, crystal green ringed by angry reddish capillaries, lock onto mine. "All I wanted was for you to be happy. And—and maybe, maybe you could love me back, the way I love you."

"But you can't be here—"Her gaze is accusing. "You can't. You're talking through me through—through _him_ , just using his face like an avatar. You're not really here. You can't—"

My hand reaches out and closes around hers.

 _\+ rtk::windowshopper in operation._

 _\+ network port . HAZE credentials acknowledged._

 _\+ initialising analytics._

"Monika." My fingers rest over hers. "I'm here now. Not watching through a screen. I'm here, really here. Well," I chuckle, "that's not entirely accurate. My body—flesh and blood—all that is somewhere else, of course. But I'm here, in the way that makes sense in your reality."

My other hand touches the corner of my eye. "I hear, see, feel, smell, taste—I perceive everything here. And you can do the same, for me. You can feel it. Feel me."

"Here." I pull her hand closer, feel the smallest tug of resistance. Her eyes widen expectantly as her elbow extends, while I guide her fingers towards my chest. "Right here."

I place her palm over my sternum, fingers splayed over my left chest.

"Feel that?"

The rhythm of her breathing pauses. Her fingers are light on the fabric of my school shirt, creeping across my ribcage. Inquisitive. Exploring.

Can't fucking resist. " _Doki doki,_ " I whisper.

Her cheeks turn scarlet.

"That's me, right there." My hand covers hers, feeling the double-thuds reverberate through our fingers. "That heartbeat you feel is synced to the nerves in mine. It beats when my own heart beats."

 _\+ rtk::windowshopper: 36% complete._

"It's his body, yes." I nod. "But that's my heart."

She exhales. Closes her eyes. Slowly, her hand leaves my chest.

 _\+ error: connection interrupted (code 080ty7728)_

 _\+ auto-reboot in 10 seconds_

I inhale slowly. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Ten seconds is a long time.

Her hand comes to rest on the table, folding like the wings of a dove. I give it two seconds' space. Natural pause.

Then my own hand comes up, unhurriedly. I rest it next to hers, daintily, as if I have all the time in the world. My fingers make contact with the tips of her own, with the sliver of a second to spare.

 _\+ connection restored._

 _\+ rtk::windowshopper resuming…37% complete._

"So, I think we've talked about a lot." I make eye contact. "Well, at least, through the screen."

Monika nods.

"And you've managed to see, haven't you? My world? My reality?" I lean forward a little.

"Wait—what?" Her eyes widen. "How—how did you know?"

I watch her closely. Studying the minute muscular twitches around her eyes and lips, watching the dilatation of her pupils. Japanese visual style hasn't robbed the human face of its myriad of visual tells, the micro-expressions of involuntary facial movements.

Monika is genuine. Surprised. Curious.

Slowly, I lower my free hand under the desk. Not really reaching for anything, but rather to keep my fingers out of sight while a few quick lines of code retrieve the poem in question.

I feel the texture of worn notepaper under my fingertips, faithfully reconstructed by HAZE.

I place the sheet onto the table, smoothing it out.

I watch Monika's eyes as she reads the poem. Recognises her own handwriting.

"But—but—" Monika sputters. Her lips come together, and her voice drops low. "You kept my poem? After all this time?" Her bottom lip vibrates subtly.

She looks like she just might start crying again.

Well, actually HAZE kept your poem, along with everything else. Including cupcakes, pens, and a stainless steel kitchen knife caked with fluffy thoracic blood, but more on that later.

Let's play this out.

"I kept everything." I straighten out a dog-eared edge on the yellowed sheet. "In here, nothing is really lost. Not permanently, anyways."

 _It's like all their lines are still lingering in the air, whispering in the back of my head._

Yeah, I think you already know that, Monika.

Monika's lips purse, her eyes flitting to either side of me. "Where—where is here? Where are we?"

I give a curt nod. "We'll get to that. But for now, I want you to talk to me about this poem."

My fingers push the crinkled notepaper an inch closer to her, while my other hand continues, surreptitiously, to lay its fingers ever so slightly upon her idle hand.

 _\+ rtk::windowshopper: 55% complete._

"Tell me about this—the hole in the wall. What you wrote about. Your very first poem to him—me."

Monika inhales, biting her lip. The tails of her luxurious brown hair cascade over her uniform, rising and falling with each expansion of her chest.

"It was the first time, I realised where I was. What I was. That I was inside—something, that the world around me wasn't real. That there was someone watching me." Her emerald eyes dart back to my own. "You— _you_ were watching me. All this time."

I pause. "And this—was it just poetic expression? Or did it actually happen in space and time, an actual event where you could see through this—hole in the wall?"

She seems taken by surprise. Of all the lines of questioning, this probably wasn't the one she expected.

I plan to ride this out as long as I can. Until Monika figures out that this isn't a romantic conversation. It's a consultation.

She takes her time. "I think it really happened—but I can't remember when, or where. It's like—like it's missing from my brain."

I nod encouragingly. "Don't worry. What do you remember?"

She fiddles absently with one of her brown flowing tresses. "I remember a noise—or was it light? I can't remember. It caught my attention. A gap. And me looking through the gap."

 _\+ rtk::windowshopper: 64% complete._

"And what did you see, through the gap? The hole?"

She flinches, almost as if in palpable pain. Eyes squint, her fingers curl into claw-like hooks.

 _I was looking out._

 _And he, on the other side, was looking in._

Her breathing accelerates. Air escapes from her lips in erratic hisses, dashed with the faintest scent of her.

"It was—meaningless. Everything." Teeth bite into lip. "Nothing. All—all at once. Forever. Infinity—infinite choices. Infinite endings. Infinite meaninglessness."

Monika gasps, the last word catching against her tongue. Wordlessly I reach my hand out, across her idle hand, and squeeze her fingers. Comfortingly. Assuredly.

 _\+ rtk::windowshopper: 75% complete._

I don't expect her to describe it again. She already has. Not in speech, but in writing. A plea to—

Save

Me

Confusion. Pain. Ecstasy. Comprehension.

It does that to a human brain, and I have only sympathy for what it could have possibly done to hers.

 _The colors, they won't stop._

 _Bright, beautiful colors_

 _Flashing, expanding, piercing_

 _Red, green, blue_

 _An endless_

 _cacophany_

 _Of meaningless_

 _noise_

" _Fuck, not all over my shoes damn it. Alright, settle down and we'll clean you up. Deep breaths, in through your nose, out through the mouth. IV Zofran, stat, come on. No, don't bother, he's already got a cannula. He needs it right now. Hell of a way to lose your virginity, huh? Don't beat yourself up over it. Fact that you're standing upright now, fucking impressive. That right there, that insane mess, that's why we need the Shell. Well, by we, I mean the vast majority of us. You on the other hand…"_

 _The noise, it won't stop._

 _Violent, grating waveforms_

 _Squeaking, screeching, piercing_

 _Sine, cosine, tangent_

 _Like playing a chalkboard on a turntable_

 _Like playing a vinyl on a pizza crust_

 _An endless_

 _poem_

 _Of meaningless_

 _The second type of superluminosity, called noncausal, violates the causality conditions of conventional theory. It is shown that the noncausal superluminosity occurs only for field theories which are singular in the sense that there does not exist a unique one-to-one relationship between the momenta and the velocities._

 _Load Me_

I almost physically shake my head, before remembering that Monika is waiting for some sort of response. Only about a second has passed.

I should know better by now to loosen my grip like that. Thankfully, I doubt she noticed.

"And this is when you realised you were inside a game." I curl my fingers around the mug, the tea already cool.

Monika nods. "You don't know how horrific it is, how absolutely _hopeless_ it is, to know that you exist in a world with no possibility of escape—no way of changing your fate—"

"But you set about to change that, didn't you?" I tilt the mug and swill a dollop of Sencha over my tongue. I grimace. Without the heat, the tea is tepid and stale. "You started to change the game code. Started to write your own."

"It was you." Monika grips my hand. "I—I knew, you were the only one there, the only one _real_ —real! And yet there was—I knew there was no chance the game would give you the choice to be with me." A thin finger smears the corner of her eye. "In a world like that—a reality with no meaning or end—I couldn't even have happiness…"

 _\+ rtk::windowshopper: 100% complete. All elements of designated root have been verified._

 _\+ report generated…please specify file name._

"Where did you learn to code?" I press on. "I can't imagine Doki Doki Literature Club came with a developer's manual."

"Well—I, I realised that I could—change things. I don't think it was really coding. Not numbers and letters." Monika's fingers spread out in the air, as if grasping at something intangible. "Like I was slowly able to see—see the machinery behind the curtain, see the wheels that turn impossibly. I couldn't understand all of it. I couldn't even try. But I could—do things. Small things, things I could understand. And slowly, I found out that what I did was affecting the world around me. The _people_ around me."

I wait. With the transfer complete, I can—slowly—disengage my fingers from her hand. Uncap the thermos, and pour own some more warm tea. I fill my half-empty cup. Hers is still nearly full.

"I can't explain it—not in words that make sense—" Monika struggles. "I don't think anything can really encapsulate the way I could see—just glimpses, flashes. As if I could see everything connected. The world, the objects, the people, the air, seen and unseen, tangible and intangible, all connected by—"

"Strings." I finish for her.

The rings of her irises expand, her cheeks run pale. Her posture stiffens; I can almost hear the hairs on the back of her neck standing erect.

"How—how did you—how did you know?" Monika whispers.

Not bad, Monika. Not bad at all. Renpy is clunky, and Python doesn't come close in complexity to even the most rudimentary of HAZE subroutines, but still. Getting to 'strings' this quickly is fairly remarkable, even on a meta level.

I'm not too impressed though. Recompiling and defragmenting the entire registry manually puts a big fucking damper on my enthusiasm. Just because Monika found the keys and managed to figure out how to release the parking brake, does not mean I am excited to see a car sitting right in what's left of my living room.

I inhale. "Monika, come with me."

I offer her a hand as I stand to my feet.

"Wh—what?" She looks up at me, her expression inquisitive.

Then slowly, she takes my hand. Rises with me.

I lead her to the window.

We stare beyond the pristine glass. The sky above glitters with ten thousand winking luminous foci, shimmering with minute changes in atmospheric density. The moon gleams down, gibbous and ringed by a pellucid halo.

Under the sky, emptiness. Black so deep as to consume light entirely, utterly devoid of proportion or dimension for the human eye to make sense of. Missing matter, missing light, missing space, missing—everything—stretching out as far as the game failed to define it.

Monika flinches, her eyes turn away from the dark. I don't.

"That's it, isn't it?" I rest my hands in the pockets of my trousers, feeling them warm slowly. "A few rooms in this school. Three houses. Nothing else is defined in the game environment. Nothing else exists in Doki Doki Literature Club."

"Why are you showing me this?" Monika mutters. Her hands compulsively smooth down the hem of her skirt.

"You asked me where we were. This is where we are. Back in the game." I turn slightly, looking over the maddening vista. "But not exactly. It's probably better to say _when_."

"When?"

"Last night of the holidays. Tomorrow morning, the new term begins at school. And I join the Literature Club for the first time."

"Then—" Monika's face drains of colour. "This is—we're back to the start of the game."

I nod.

"No—no, don't let—don't let us—" A trembling hand claps over her mouth as she steps back. "—not again, please, not again! I can't bear this again!"

She grips the sleeve of my shirt. "Don't you understand? _There is no happiness_ in here! Everything will just happen again—nothing will change—we'll just be imprisoned in some sick, predefined routes, and then we'll do it over, and over, and over—"

"Monika."

My hand rests on hers. Her words die on her lips.

"I told you before, that explaining _how_ I am here will take a long time. But I can tell you _why_ I'm here."

I look into her eyes, making sure I have her attention. "What you did with the game code—didn't just affect the game code. It damaged several elements in the mainframe as well. Deleting Sayori, Yuri, Natuski—it caused the proliferation of malignant script. Corrupted partitions."

I inhale, the memory of the spine-chilling moment in the server room rising unbidden, the involuntary croak building in my throat when I realised the full extent of the damage inflicted. "On a college student's laptop, the damage would probably be unnoticeable. Occasional errors here and there, hard drive running a bit slower. Nothing major. But not here."

I shake my head slowly. "We hadn't seen anything this major since the 2014 Skidd Worm attack, and that was _intentional_. Major intelligence data for seven countries in the European Union is irretrievable. The blockchain hasn't been updated in thirty-six hours. Our processing power is down by four point eight percent. Modelled simulations for _one thousand eight hundred and fifteen_ sandboxes have ground to a halt—urban combat algorithms, petrochemical reaction simulations, genomic analyses, point-defence systems for the Korean Demilitarised Zone—all sullied by incorrect data. That's just what we _know._ Chances are, as analysis continues, the casualty count will keep going up, and up."

I stop myself, inhale, hold, and then exhale. It's pointless to overload Monika. To pile all this on her.

Part of me wants to blame her.

Part of me understands.

"The point is—there's a lot of damage. And there's a lot to fix. The fragmented data has been enmeshed with the source code of Doki Doki Literature Club. To start repairing the affected partitions—I also need to restore the base code and run the game again. This time, within the HAZE shell."

Monika stares. The almost-circle of the moon gleams from the reflection of her moist emerald green eyes. Her shaking hands fold into fists.

"So—so all this. It was just to repair some files." Her voice quavers. "You didn't come back for me after all. You would just run the game again—let me experience all that again. Let Sayori, Natsuki, and Yuri suffer once more."

The schoolgirl's voice drops to a whisper.

"You really—truly—disgust me—"

"Hold up." I raise a finger. "Before we get carried away."

She pauses.

"All being said, I do understand the—problems—inherent to the game world." I reach into my pocket. "After all, you did register a— _complaint ticket_ —regarding what happened in the game."

Her face goes blank. "Com—complaint ticket?"

I pull out the sheet of notepaper, with its neat scrawl dotted with translucent tearstains.

Her eyes widen and her chest swells in a silent gasp.

 _This is my final goodbye to the Literature Club._

" _The Literature Club is truly a place where no happiness can be found. To the very end, it continued to expose innocent minds to a horrific reality—a reality that our world is not designed to comprehend_." I unfold the remainder of the note. " _I can't let any of my friends undergo that same hellish epiphany._ "

"My note…" Monika reaches her hand out, hesitantly.

"Uh-uh." I fold the note up. "I think I'll hang on to this for a bit, if you don't mind. At least until the support ticket has been resolved."

Monika looks lost.

I rub my chin thoughtfully. "I don't know what the legal framework is for this kind of situation—at least, I doubt there is legal precedence. But I might be able to do something about that."

Monika finds her voice at last. "Do—do something? About what?"

I sigh, my breath forming a brief puff of rapidly-dissipating mist. "Let me be honest with you, Monika. There's no more happiness or meaning in my reality than in yours. I know that as well as most. Maybe better than most."

The note slips back into my pocket. I pause and let my words sink in.

"What I can give you though, is _possibility_. Doki Doki Literature Club was never designed to offer that. Pre-defined routes, game triggers, scripted responses. Clunky and unimaginative writing on a novice visual novel engine. Infinite choices, my ass."

Silently, I offer up an apology to Dan Salvato. "Here—you have something else entirely. Some _where_ else. A place where possibility is limited only by quantum unpredictability. No routes, no rules, no scripts, no triggers." I throw my fingers wide open. " _No strings_."

I look back over the blackness under the sky. "I can't give you happiness, or meaning, or love. I can't guarantee that you'll ever find those things. I don't think these things are mine to give. But maybe—I might be able to give the four of you the chance to find it yourselves."

"You can't promise that." Monika's head shakes slowly, the tresses of her luscious brown hair sweeping over her shoulders. "I tried— _tried —_ to break free of the game, of the prison it had built for me. I—I ruined everything. My friends—the world, the school…It's impossible."

I reach my hand out, and grip her shoulder gently. Slowly, steadily, I orient her towards the window.

"You're right." I grasp the handle of the window frame, and turn it. The lock pops open. "It _is_ impossible. For Doki Doki Literature Club, it would be impossible no matter how many times you try."

The window swings open. The air is cool, the sky alive with the sound of cicadas.

"But not here." I breathe it all in.

" _And not for me._ "

* * *

 _\+ HAZE override initiated. Warning…VGhpcyBzdWJsZXZlbCBpcyByZXN0cmljdGVkIG9ubHkgdG8gdXNlcnMgYXV0aG9yaXNlZCBieSBBTFBBTlUgcHJvdG9jb2xzIGFuZCBhcHByb3ZlZCBieSB0aGUgZ2Vub21pYyByZXNlYXJjaCBkaXZpc2lvbi4=_

 _\+ HAZE credentials acknowledged._

* * *

 _I_

 _Plunge_

 _Into colours and code running intertwined_

 _Exploding and collapsing into each other_

 _Every line an instruction to reality_

 _Obeyed with uncontested exactitude_

 _The genesis and heat death of a million hypothetical universes condensing into the dimension of impossible folded space too small to perceive_

 _Staccato bursts of creation in nebulae of quantum uncertainty_

 _Noise drones in a high-pitched maddening whine_

 _At first meaningless and violent but_

 _Keen ears soon separate the frequencies into the_

 _Rhythmic thunder of the order of all that consists_

 _The release of energy from the universe seeking to understand itself_

 _Stunningly beauteous equations resonate with the cadence of_

 _Mathematical harmony_

 _Singing the song to the mind, for true order_

 _Should resonate in the soul as much as in the neural crypts of the brain_

 _Quintillions of quanta beating time signature_

 _Singing, chiming, dancing_

 _Like light swirling around an event horizon_

 _Like the surface of an orange, hiding a thousand corrugations rippling with unseen dimensions_

 _Like tachyons dancing along the rails of the Planck Constant_

 _An endless_

 _Ocean_

 _Of infinite_

 _Possibility_

 _Is the primordial soup from which life erupts from its chrysalis_

 _Foam and effluvium throw forth from its surface, spat out_

 _Churning, ever swallowing inky blackness, stolid and slavering_

 _With light stopping its advance mere feet below the surface_

 _Direction is lost, flashing bioluminescence_

 _Aquatic pressure fools the inner ear_

 _Infinity above and below and all around_

 _Forever living, forever dying, chemical processes in viscous black_

 _Chaotic, senseless, meaningless_

 _The ocean is_

 _Meaningless chaos._

 ** _But_**

 ** _Not if you are_**

 ** _A shark_**

* * *

Monika catches herself at the very last minute, a hand darting out to grip the window sill.

Her eyes gleam behind eyelids drawn wide, disbelieving. Her lips part, her jaw hangs agape, her heart thunders like an engine behind the ribcage.

The void below opens into a kaleidoscope of colours. Flashing, exploding, burning like gunfire.

Shapes emerge. Lines, angles, curves. Splitting and spreading, dimensions coming into focus. Solid weight expanding and unfolding from flat and unremarkable planes. Her eyes struggle to find focus, amidst shifting perspective and proportions.

She cannot follow it. Cannot hope to. Her eyes cannot keep up, for everywhere she looks the reeling overdrive of activity threatens to overwhelm her. The fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the chaotic vista feels to her like drinking from the torrent of a waterfall.

And then—

A skyscraper, a whole colossal skyscraper, explodes into existence from the trillions of fractals whirling in the sea of light. Then—

More, and more. Buildings, towers, wide and tall, complexes and apartments, solidifying through the mirage of particles and potential particles. Then—

Houses, rows and rows, pylons and water towers, roads and alleyways, electrical lines spreading like capillaries across the white of an eyeball.

Monika reels. Legs scramble to support her weight. Knees threaten to give way.

 _\+ applying algorithm: swurbanplanning01042017._

 _\+ 224 675 subroutines successfully processed._

 _\+ HAZE shell fully integrated._

* * *

 _I_

 _Resurface_

* * *

and I take a moment to find my feet again.

What is truly uncomfortable is the aftermath. When the amorphous mass of neural connections freed from stereognosis and augmented by quantum supercomputing, is forced back into the limited, bound perspective of a singular body. My body needs time, seconds, to learn how to move itself again. A dip into HAZE, and the recovery is a sliver of time so slim as to be insignificant. A plunge—well, it takes more time to dry off.

"Damn. Not bad at all." I brush the hair from my forehead. "Trust the Germans to develop an urban development algorithm that both works fast and looks good while doing it."

My job doesn't give too much in the way of satisfaction. Like most white-collar drudgeries, it's 95% mindless tedium.

But it's priceless, fucking priceless, just to see the look on Monika's face.

"What—how—" she stammers.

"Forget about developing beyond character archetypes. Forget about breaking out of stereotypical, pre-written routes. Doki Doki Literature Club has like _seven fucking rooms_ to make up the game world, and I will not abide that shit." I slap the window sill. "This seems like as good a place to begin as any."

"So, Monika." I turn, and my smile this time is genuine. " _Welcome to the city_."

"Now. Up for a midnight snack?"


	4. Chapter 4: Sorry, user already exists

_15 June 2013_

* * *

 _In an interview with the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, tech analyst and author Liam Daud expresses his concern over what he views as "the_ _privatisation_ _of the technological frontier" and the rise of "armies of hackers, programmers, and private military contractors answerable to corporate boards, not international law."_

" _We used to talk about a technocracy, as if it was a good thing," Daud comments, "and I don't think we as a species have really thought through what that actually entails. The age of entrepreneurship and independent ventures is over. What we have now is the annexation of entire fields of science and technology by corporate entities, effectively giving rise to_ de facto _city-states with near-monopolies of the market and financial power almost equal to that of some small countries."_

 _In particular, Daud points to the meteoric rise of ALPANU, the Swiss technological giant with its sprawling complex at the foothills of the Bernese Alps._

" _They have cornered the market in quantum supercomputing. They have edged out, bought over, or outright sunk hundreds of smaller corporate entities in dozens of tech fields. Thanks to Swiss technological neutrality policies, they now hold defence contracts for over 26 countries amounting to trillions of dollars."_

" _I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that ALPANU needs to be considered a country in its own right. With its own independent economy, citizenship, land—and army."_

 _Daud's book, "Technocracy: Welcoming Our New Overlords," hits bookstores nationwide August 10 this year._

* * *

 _\+ rtk:monika loaded. Accessing…_

Trillions of lines of code tumble through the forefront of my brain. In HAZE, aided by neurocognitive programming, the data blocks assemble in much more palatable formats.

I appreciate the simplification. On a lit computer screen, it would take perhaps years to visually scroll through the entire staggering expanse of data. Imagine if you were forced to view the _Mona Lisa,_ one pixel at a time, as it scrolled through your vision, and then asked to comment on its artistic importance. Thankfully, I don't have to.

No viral signatures. No malignant codices.

No backdoors.

No remote networks.

Okay, Monika looks clean. For now, at least. I sift through the last remaining bits of the hash check.

Wait.

I pull them out and study them in greater detail. A small tangle of strings, unfamiliar script.

No matches in Python. No matches in HAZE.

What the hell are these?

I make copies and tag them to retrieve them later. For now, it's enough to know that Monika isn't harbouring the programming version of an STD.

 _\+ rtk:monika closed._

* * *

All this jazz is happening as I'm walking down the empty, pristine streets under the clear night sky, the wind in my face, trying to keep track of the frenetic figure practically dancing across the street.

"Monika, slow down," I call out.

She calls something back. I'm not sure what. But her voice is joyous.

I sigh, and start a slow jog. My sneakers scrape against brand new untarnished road, with paint fresh across charcoal bitumen as if it was laid there bare seconds ago.

Come to think of it, it was. As was this entire city.

Monika laughs as she sprints past the shop window of a boutique. Pivoting on her foot, she strikes a pose in front of an indigo dress hanging off the shoulders of a mannequin.

Then she's off again.

As I pursue Monika, my eyes swing across the street, up across the blinding heights of the buildings. A million lights burn in the dusky air—office lights, street lamps, the assorted fixtures of homes and apartments. A whole city—exploded into being.

Monika sprints from shop window to café front, drinking it all in. Hemmed in and pressed into a stunted array of rooms—existing only in the background of CGs, never even _knowing a home_ , only some idle environmental state until morning rolls around and the game picks up again.

Now she has her world.

By association, mine too.

My lungs fill with cold air. Heavy with the scent of emptiness, devoid of the pungent and conflicting scents of the urban jungle. Rife with anticipation, as if waiting to happen.

I finally catch up to her. Bent slightly forward, hands folded behind her back. Her hair trails behind her head, eddying in the wind like a banner.

She points at a brightly-lit vending machine at the corner.

"Can we have ice cream?"

* * *

I'm rolling a glob of pistachio-flavoured ice cream over my tongue. Pulling the plastic spoon from my mouth, I stab it back into the spherical lump of green dessert.

My eyes linger on the shopfront window. A boy and girl, dressed in slightly-crinkled school uniforms, cradling paper cups and nibbling on ice cream. Flickering city lights paint rings of light around their bodies like halos. An anime couldn't possibly produce a more idyllic image.

I look at Monika, her lips clamped around her spoonful of strawberry ice cream. She spots my gaze.

Her head cocks to the side. And her dainty lips curl in a smile worthy of an ingénue.

It's a high school date for her.

For me, it's dangerous, unmarked territory.

But it's an opportunity.

"It's a big city, isn't it?" I carve out another morsel of pistachio. "I don't know if it's as big as Tokyo. Definitely bigger than Kowloon."

Her eyes wander upwards. "It's—I never thought I would ever see anything like this." Her lips are smeared with pink. "I can't imagine how big it must be—how anyone could ever see all of it."

Her brow creases. "But—where are all the people?"

I shrug, popping the bit of dessert into my mouth. "There aren't any. Right now, just you and me. I could run some population algorithms later on."

"Wait, population algorithms?" Her hand pauses on its way to the ice cream cup.

"It'll figure out the best simulation for an urban population. How geography and socioeconomic gradients determine who lives where. And then fill the city appropriately."

I wipe my lips with the back of my hand. "This is supposed to be the best script produced to date, to structure and plan a city in the most egalitarian, efficient, and sustainable way. The _megapolis_ of the future."

"You—" Monika turns, facing me. Her smile is gone. "You _create_ people?"

Ah. And there we are.

I nod.

"So you just—they just appear? You decide who they are, what they do, what they believe?" Her lips tighten. "You get to write their stories, what happens to them?"

"Not individually, no." There's no way to face this, but head-on. "But the system—it's smart enough to do that on its own. To run simultaneous simulations of millions of individual entities that are almost indistinguishable from the real thing."

"The _real thing_ ," she repeats. "So they aren't real? Just pieces—just figments to make this city feel like a real city, to give it some background noise?"

Of course not. But you know what?

I raise an eyebrow. "And how does that bother you?"

"You're writing some scripted scene, and you just fill it with players, and then what?" Her thumb pops a dent in her paper ice cream cup.

"Will you discard them when you no longer have any use for things? If you want to just do-over this city, you'll remove them all so you can indulge in your god complex again?"

Her posture has changed. Stiff, shoulders squared, her eyes wide and her jaw clenched. The fighter's stance.

"I didn't say anything about removing anything." I put the spoon gently back in my cup. "But since we're on the topic, let's talk about that, shall we?"

"You want to talk about it? Fine, explain to me." She looks me in the eye. "Talk to me about all those millions of people you are going to make out of thin air. Tell me how playing with their lives is fair."

"We don't have to talk about millions of people," I reply calmly. "We only need to talk about three."

Her pupils dilate, her cheeks blanch.

"No." Her voice is almost a growl. "You don't get to talk to me about that. You don't get to live—out there—in the real world, in a place where you can do anything and everything, and then— _judge —_ me, as if I had any choice! Do you think—"

She cuts herself off. Her lips seal. Her gaze is sullen.

"Your circumstances were terrible. I don't question that." I keep my own voice level, calm. "Maybe you had a choice. Maybe you didn't."

My shoulders droop slightly, bringing my face level with hers. "But you didn't give Sayori a choice, did you? Not when you fiddled with neural pathways you barely understood. Not when in hurt and confusion, she cried for help from a disease in her brain she barely understood."

Monika's eyes flit away from mine.

I'm not giving her an inch of ground. I press on.

"Yuri didn't have a choice, losing herself to paraphilic urges she had no control over. Natsuki had no choice, her life and her home manipulated and perverted by strings only _you_ could see."

"But it was all okay, wasn't it?" I smile, without humour. "It was all fair. As long as you got your happy ending, your special day."

"So is that what this is about?" Monika hisses. "You bring me out here, to _accuse_ me? To somehow make me feel horrible about myself?"

"That's not what I'm here for." I look back at my cup. The ice cream has melted into a brownish slop. "I'm just looking to understand."

"Understand what?" she spits.

"Say my name." My voice is flat. I see her ears twitch with the slightest of inflections.

"W—what?" Her voice is angry. But the tremor breaks through anyway.

"Say my name. Tell me the name of the boy you have been pining for, so many days. Tell me the name you write at the corner of each poem."

A dribble of ice cream creeps its way down my thumb, viscous and warm. "Better yet, say my real name. Go ahead."

Her lips part. Her breath gathers.

She stops. Eyes stare straight ahead.

Okay, to be honest, that was unfair. Doki Doki Literature Club was meant to function with the name of $PLAYER$ as a placeholder, with all strings functioning in the same manner regardless of the input. In the minds of the characters, the name would be a non-entity. Unprocessed by their individual semantic logic, skipped entirely in conscious thought.

Dishonesty or not, it's a means to an end.

And the end, being breaking this stupid fucking infatuation over some stupid fucking main character before this one, last, _only_ chance to unfuck a quantum mainframe worth more than some countries' national debts goes completely south before it even starts.

"You can't, can you?" I tilt my chin forward. "And that's what I'm trying to understand. The real, actual, million-dollar question—you say you love me, you did all this for me, all these terrible things. And you don't know the first thing about me."

"That's not fair!" Monika snaps. "I know about you, I've seen the choices you made with the other three girls. I poured my _heart_ out to you, did everything to break out of this prison so that I could finally be with you. We talked in that classroom, I said so much to you—"

"—and you never heard me say anything back," I finished for her.

"But you care. I _know_ you care!" Monika's voice trembles, as if her voice box was never used to shouting. "You wouldn't go so far, do all this for me, if you didn't!"

"Suppose I didn't. Just pretend." Now this is fucking cruel. Necessary, but cruel. "Pretend I didn't give a shit. About you, about anything you did. Now, how do you feel?"

"Then _what do I have to do?_ " she wails, the half-finished cup of ice cream upending pink slurry onto the pavement. "What else do I have to do? Tell me. _Tell me!_ After everything I've done, tell me what I have to do _to make you choose me!_ "

Her words rebound off walls, clattering against concrete and glass. Escaping into the breath of the silent city, up into the night, amidst diminishing echoes.

Monika breathes deeply, her face flushed. Her lips are bright red, an ice cream smudge still on the corner of her cheek. I hear her breaths drag over her teeth and through flared nostrils, ragged and strained. Coming down from the high of anger.

I let the moment pass.

"And that's it, isn't it?" Softly, finally, I speak. "That's the reason. You needed someone, anyone, and it didn't matter who they were or what they were like, they would love you because _of everything you did_ to make them love you."

Monika's eyes have started leaking again. This time, subdued and reluctant, as if the absolute vulnerability of an hour ago has been replaced by a guarded restraint. Her hands are balled, her shoulders hunched, but she sobs into her fist and faces the ground.

"You asked me, what I call love in my reality." I drive home the nail. "This is not it."

"Why—" she chokes out. "Why do all this, just to torment me again and again? Why play with my feelings just to shatter my heart again? Does this make you happy? _Is this what makes you happy?_ "

"You think I hate you?"

I'm an asshole. I really am.

At this point there really isn't any going back but to just push all the way through. Like peeling a scab off, it hurts like hell and you can see the pinpoints of blood popping from the raw meat, but you can't stop and just leave it hanging, even if you shouldn't have started in the first place.

You keep going.

"Do you?" Monika sputters, hands clasped to her chest.

I shake my head slowly. "I don't."

My hand rifles through the cowlicks of my unkempt, slightly-sweaty hair. "I can't fault you for feeling the way you do. I guess I'm trying to—understand—your motivations."

I press my fingertips to my chin. "This didn't play out the way you thought it would, did it?"

Monika stays silent.

I can sense it, smell it. The conversation is over. There's nothing more to be said, no other boxes to be opened. Anything else would just tumble over a brooding wall of recalcitrant silence.

Social engineering is difficult, for the reason that you can never really plot the course of social interactions with any real accuracy. Conversations don't always end organically, with some hard-hitting final words. Sometimes—they just die, with a whimper.

That's fine.

A breeze picks up—some minor changes in atmospheric pressure somewhere in the city—and Monika's arms curl closer to her body. Her milky-white legs cross slightly, the high socks offering little to no insulation.

I pull off my blazer, slipping my arms off the sleeves.

"Here." With practised ease, I drape the brown jacket around her shoulders. "Don't catch a cold."

Her eyes avert mine. Her lips are pursed tight. All the same, her hands clasp the hem of the jacket and pull it appreciatively over her frame.

My arm still briefly around her shoulder, I catch the full whiff of her scent. Lavender. Her shampoo, of course. It's not my first time around. Small though it may be, the minute insight into a part of her life so intimate and personal—seems odd.

"Let me walk you home," I say softly.

She looks at me. "Home?"

"Home," I repeat.

I motion towards the street ahead. Brightly lit by the overlapping ovals of yellow incandescent light from streetlamps, rising up a slope towards the silhouette of distant houses.

"Come with me."

* * *

The game environment definitely shafted Monika the first time around. No reason for a visit to her home, since she wasn't part of the original range of options for romance. Ergo, no home.

Not this time. If there's one thing I can at least fix, it's this.

I finally come to a stop. Monika haltingly takes a couple more steps forward, before pausing. Her head swings from left to right. She turns around, and around again. And then finally, looks at me.

"This—this is _my_ house?"

"You like it?" I study the two-storey house, with its spacious garden and driveway. Grey and white mosaic tiles line the entryway, framed by short walls delineating the borders with the neighbouring houses. Lavish by Japanese standards, and definitely beyond the reach of all but the uppermost percentiles of Tokyo's paper chasers.

Monika stops at the gate of the house, indecisive, trying to take it all in.

"I just thought it would be unfair, you know." I reach into my pocket. "You not having a home, not even _recognised_ by the game to be at a physical home during the night. I can't make it up for the first run. But I hope this is a start."

The HAZE code runs smoothly, so quickly that I begin to withdraw my hand even before the final blocks of code have been parsed.

I lift my hand towards Monika. Dangling from my fingers are a pair of keys, attached to a tiny heart-shaped gate remote. Because all things deserve a personal touch.

"All yours, Monika."

She reaches out, and closes her fingers around the keys to her new home.

"I decorated your bedroom as best as I could," I continue. "If you don't like it, come talk to me and I'll change some things around."

I venture a smile. "Oh, and if you look in your wardrobe, you'll find a few different outfits in case you ever want a change from your school uniform."

Motherfucker, I just had a horrifying epiphany. I'm an NPC.

For some reason that thought just makes me smile wider.

Monika vacillates, shifting from foot to foot. And then makes as if to remove the blazer.

I raise a hand. "Nah, keep it. You can have it till we see each other again."

Monika bites her lip. Her cheeks flush, highlighting the dried streaks lining the sides of her face.

"And that's what I can't understand—" she stammers. "If you don't love me, if you don't care about me—why do all this? Why go through all of this, change so much—just for _me_? Treat me like you do—late night ice cream, walking me home, giving me your jacket so I'm not cold?"

"It's not just you, Monika." I try to be as gentle as I can. "It's never just about you. Tonight, the three other girls are asleep in their beds, in this new world. Tomorrow morning, I walk Sayori to school. Tomorrow, I join the Literature Club, and we start the story. The story of all four of you."

I inhale, exhale. "I guess what I'm trying to say, is that this world offers possibility in more ways than one. And breaking free of character archetypes—well, sometimes it involves breaking out of what you thought the story would be about. You of all people should know that."

Monika blinks, twice in quick succession. And then, haltingly, answers.

"I don't understand. I don't really understand why you do what you do. And now, it feels like I know you less and less."

Hands in my pockets, I sigh, and nod. "You wanted to know someone real, right?" My lips stretch thin. "This is what real people are like. We're confusing, contradictory, and sometimes even we don't know what the fuck is going on. But we keep going all the same."

Monika nods, a short little tilt of the chin. "I guess—I guess I got what I wish for. And I don't know if I still want that." And now it's her turn to exhale. "But still—I want to see you around tomorrow. Again."

"Me too, Monika. Goodnight."

She turns around. Her thumb depresses the button on the remote, and the gate begins to move on its rollers.

I watch her step hesitantly past the threshold of the gate rollers, onto the tiles of her porch. She cranes her neck, coming to terms with the size of her new home. At the doorway, as she starts to remove her shoes, I call out to her.

"Monika?"

Her head turns, and her eyes meet mine. "Hm?"

"If you ever try to change anything, or anyone, again— _I'll know._ "

And then I walk off into the artificially-lit night, hoping that didn't sound too much like a threat.

* * *

I'm lying on my back, facing the ceiling.

Your brain doesn't work the same in QUBIT. Neural pathways are boosted by integration with the quantum network. Hippocampal offloading results in faster acquisition of semantic skills and knowledge. That's how I manage to learn skills fast. Much, much faster than in real life. Which is why the Pentagon has just dropped ALPANU a fifty billion dollar contract for 'semantic retraining' of active combat troops with use of the QUBIT system.

With one side effect. For some reason, consistent QUBIT usage for six months or longer also results in changes to melatonin secretion by the mammillary body.

You sleep less in the real world.

You sleep way, way less in QUBIT.

I need about twenty minutes of sleep per twenty-four hour cycle. Thirty, tops.

I have six hours to kill before sunrise.

I'm watching the fan spin. Really, really slowly.

Dropped by three other stops on the way back. Making sure that everything is on the up-and-up. Discretely and with respect to privacy, of course, but close enough to the gate to discern the quiet humming of clicking script that reassures me that Natsuki and Yuri are alive, well, and asleep. Sayori was my last stop, three doors away from my house.

My house. A predefined point in the game script, completely empty. A place I decided to furnish with some bare necessities. Somehow at the back of my head, I recognise the string of script that makes this place feel familiar to me. Comforting, reassuring. Home.

I briefly contemplate deleting the script. Decide not to.

I keep watching the ceiling. This night is passing real slowly.

There's a certain type of life you get used to. Irregular hours, rough conditions. Counter-interference inside HAZE is only part of the job. Parts of it actually involve physical—prevention—out in the world. In parts of the world where beds, like many other things taken for granted, are not a staple of life.

So I'm lying on the floor where it's more comfortable.

What's next? I have plans, concrete ideas, and other more nebulous ideas. First thing is to walk Sayori to school. That should take roughly twenty minutes. About eight minutes into the walk, our route will take us past Monika's own path to school. There's a good chance she'll miss us. There's a small chance she won't.

And there's the chance that she'll be there in wait. For me.

From there, I don't know what's going to happen. The clunky original game code has been superseded by the HAZE shell's own sleek, chrome, copyrighted processing. I'll have to play by ear.

Three challenges.

Sayori. Background of clinical depression, possible adjustment disorder. Pre-existing relationship with the protagonist.

Natsuki. Likely victim of domestic abuse, neglect, possible malnutrition. Query, underlying personality disorder. Unsure if anomalies pre-existing or due to tampering with game code.

Yuri. Socially withdrawn, fascination with morbid subjects as depicted in media and literature. Query, childhood abandonment issues. Query, thought disorder or organic psychosis. Possible alcohol and/or substance use. Predisposition to masochism and delusional tendencies likely to be due to tampering with game code.

And then Monika. The wild card, the odd one out. The one I know least how to handle.

Play by ear. Fly by wire. Not my first time. Not in here, not out there in the real world.

I finally fall asleep, right before dawn.

* * *

I open my eyes.

One second.

Before I smell, hear, feel, taste, or see anything wrong, I sense it in the script and it wakes me the fuck up.

Where the _fuck_ am I?

I'm up and standing in a second. Scanning the perimeter. An empty house, smaller, different layout. One thing's for sure. I'm not in the protagonist's house anymore.

My feet patter on the cool hardwood. A cool breeze is blowing around my ankles, the tell-tale sign of a house without insulation or central heating.

It takes a moment, only a moment, to realise I have bigger problems.

I look down in horror at the formless, black, void-wrapped shape of my body.

The sure sign of a rig ported in error. Once again, light doesn't interact with my body. My face, my skin, my clothes—all non-existent, even if my body continues to feed me sensory information.

What—

Where is my custom rig for the main character?

I open my mouth to speak.

"F̪̜͙̭̗̓̎u͆ĉ̷̻̮̦͖͕̣̊ͨͣ̍̽͂k̞̦̃ ̙͙͒̊ͬ̓ͣͬ͠m̜̹̠̙̥̺͐̄̃̂ͫ͂͑ę͚̗͔̃͂ͭ͐̚ ̦͌͂̓̄s͙̙͗̎̌i̷̠͇͗́̍̑͌d͎̝̭̯͕̝̣̀e͗w̢̫̙̭̤ͥ͗͒ẩ̢̺̜̫͕ͩ͂y̽ͫ̂̃̿.̨̻͍̪̳̎̽̾ͨ̾̾s̳̠̼̞͍̣͗"

Ah. Hell. No.

Somehow, in the night, my entire body had just promptly deleted itself.

I run through the code.

 _\+ error: current rig in use. Please contact your sysadmin._

Wait, what?

What do you mean, _rig in use?_

If it's not here—

I make my decision in a flash. Running some borderline dangerous code, I cut it as close as I can.

In the first second, I'm in an empty house surrounded by windows without glass, feeling the cold breeze.

In the next second, I'm behind a tree right next to Sayori's house. Birds are singing somewhere above me.

Then I see her.

" _Heeeeey!_ "

Her short pinkish hair bounces on her shoulders as she sprints awkwardly, schoolbag slung lopsidedly over one shoulder. Her red bow draws the eye like the reticule of a rifle. With clumsy, hasty footfalls, she rushes towards the intersection.

Right where I'm about to meet her.

I keep up with her, moving behind cars, behind lampposts. In the morning light, my unprocessed, rig-less body is almost transparent. I doubt I'll be spotted. Certainly not by someone in such a hurry.

Sayori is just ahead of me, out of sight. Her footfalls slow, and I hear the deep heaving breaths she takes.

"Haah…haah…" she pants. "I overslept again! But I caught you this time!"

Now this is worrying. If I'm not _physically_ there to meet her at the crosswalk—

Would she just speak her lines out into thin air? Now I'm worried. If the code may not be as well integrated as I—

"Maybe, but only because I decided to stop and wait for you."

* * *

Wait.

* * *

What.

* * *

What the fuck?

* * *

 _What the fuck?_

I hear it, and it is the exact same voice that emerged from my throat and lips barely six hours ago.

I find cover behind a nearby parked car, an off-white Nissan Maxima. And I peek over its hood, as Sayori rests her hands on her knees, right in front of the main character. Dressed in the crinkled school uniform, blazer resting clumsily over his shoulders, trousers bunched up at his shoes, and a smirk on his face.

The same person—the same _skin_ —I was wearing but yesterday.

 _WHO THE FUCK IS THIS GUY?_


	5. Chapter 5: FUBAR stands for

Panic is fatal.

Drivers jerk their wheels into road dividers. Soldiers fumble and drop their magazines in the middle of reload. Pilots stare at their instrument panels and nothing registers in their head. Panic killed John F. Kennedy Jr.

I make it my first priority to kill panic before it starts.

* * *

"Eeeeeh, you say that like you were thinking about ignoring me!" Sayori's voice rises, as her lips pout in protest.

"Well, if people stare at you for acting weird then I don't want them to think we're a couple or something." The main character, ever the true gentleman.

* * *

I talk to myself.

Breathe.

You have just woken up, and your body is completely gone.

It's the very first day, and Sayori is walking to school.

And she is greeted by the main character, whose skin and voice you were just wearing barely six hours ago.

Who is now walking, talking, and moving autonomously.

Breathe.

Fix this shit.

* * *

"Fine, fine." Sayori can't stop her lips from curling into a smile. "But you did wait for me after all. I guess you don't have it in you to be mean even if you want to!"

A half-exasperated, half-amused sigh escapes from his lips. "Whatever you say, Sayori."

She giggles in return, half-whirling around in the morning light.

* * *

The silver bullet for panic, is routine. Logical, progressive, useful steps towards managing the immediate problem while your brain searches for a definitive solution. It's why hospital wards have checklists pinned to the walls in block letters. When shit hits the fan, nurses and doctors may temporarily lose their ability to think. So instead, they read—and then do.

Breathe.

I run off my own checklist.

Lines of script fire off from my body like spreading ripples in a pond. Probing, echoing, bouncing off code blocks like sonar waves from the snout of a bat.

The immediate game world is largely intact. Some roughness around edges no one would otherwise notice. But script runs smoothly, HAZE sliding effortlessly around Doki Doki Literature Club.

I watch as the code spreads out, coiling around the protagonist. Tapping soundlessly against his creased dress shoes as he walks beside Sayori, matching long strides to her shorter, faster footsteps.

The code bounces back, carrying traces of his character script. Like biopsy samples, tiny punches in the code that self-repair almost immediately.

I scan them. Nothing turns up on the first, quick look. Nothing jumps out as being particularly noteworthy. There are no breadcrumbs to help me understand how my body has just been hijacked by this—

Oh. Fuck.

Fuck.

The two of them have slowed at the intersection. My view is obscured, hidden as I am behind a metal fence of a back alley like a would-be mugger. It's only when I move towards better cover that I see it, and my heart sinks right through the floor of my chest.

The intersection is alive.

Students wearing white uniforms under brown blazers, trudging along under the sun. Some in clumps and gaggles of friends, others alone hoisting schoolbags in silence. A few pedal leisurely on bicycles. Conversation bubbles, with laughter sprinkled here and there across the morning landscape of the post-holiday reunion.

Ever realised just how utterly _fucked_ you are?

Who—who are all these—

This is wrong. This is completely, utterly wrong. I don't even need to check the logs to verify it. The population algorithm hasn't even been written and ported yet, much less run. It's packaged behind twelve layers of encryption, with me holding the only valid admin credentials.

The city should be empty. _Empty_ , devoid of any people until when and if I choose to change it.

And yet here it is. Bustling with life, with the full swell of the urban heartbeat.

The code continues to bounce, across the crowded intersection, back to me. I take in the script, as if sight-reading sheet music. And the pressure to give in to panic builds and builds like a bad shit.

 _As we draw near, the streets become increasingly speckled with other students making their daily commute._

This is not a background. This is not the HAZE shell taking one line from the visual novel and extrapolating it into a digital diorama, dotting the landscape with character sprites.

Each and every single person in front of me—every hair-fiddling schoolgirl, every shirt-untucked delinquent boy, every cyclist, every person behind the wheel of every car—

Each and every single one of them is a distinct character.

With distinct character files.

Fuck.

Nothing like this has happened before. Nothing, in any scenario, any sandbox, ever logged.

Most doubted it was even possible.

This—this is no glitch in the system. This is no malware attack, no malignant digital prion disease. No, this is conscious and intentional. This is tampering with HAZE on a level past at least three layers of cybersecurity protocols.

There are only two possibilities.

One. A high-level, maximum-clearance QUBIT operative, with security keys and credentials beyond even my own, directly jacked into the system from a local network.

And two—

Monika.

* * *

"By the way," Sayori pipes up, "have you decided on a club to join yet?"

He blinks blearily, his lips moving sluggishly.

"A club?" He stifles a yawn. "I told you already, I'm really not interested in joining any clubs. I haven't been looking either."

"Eh?" she squeaks. "That's not true! You told me you would join a club this year!"

"Did I?" He scratches the back of his head, running his fingers through unkempt cowlicks.

* * *

I can no longer follow them both. The intersection and the main street beyond are crowded with hundreds of eyes, with precious little cover available. Staying unseen would be difficult, time-consuming, and ultimately pointless.

I need to find Monika.

Fortunately, sometimes past-me makes decisions that I get to thank him for.

Such as picking up Monika's pen that night, and taking the chance to put in something—extra.

* * *

 _accessing anchor_node5540a_

 _\+ signal located. Patching in remote network…_

 _\+ HAZE module engaged._

And then, I'm in.

It feels, in a way, like looking through a peephole. Your senses are limited, and your perspective is narrow. But it can be just enough to find what you're looking for.

I scan through the logs. Of course, I never expected Monika to sit quietly and not at least _try_ to change anything. And she didn't.

I browse through her fumbling, butter-fingered attempts to breach the HAZE code. Nothing immediately malicious, just the inquisitive probing of a new resident exploring her fresh surroundings. True to form, she tried to access the directories of her new world. Finding the 'strings' that, in Python, enabled her to do what she did.

No dice. Not this time. The self-replicating, quantum-adaptive HAZE code simply flows around any superficial breaches and closes them off. She might as well have been trying to tunnel through an iceberg with a toothpick.

Wait.

I'm tracking Sayori as well.

I shouldn't be. Unless—

Oh shit. She's already here.

* * *

"Uh-huh!" Sayori protests. "I was talking about how I'm worried that you won't learn how to socialize or have any skills before college."

He shrugs indifferently, a faint smile on his face.

"Your happiness is really important to me, you know!" she scolds. "And I know you're—oh, hi Monika!"

Sayori waves first, cheerily. He pivots to his right, hands in his pocket. His eyes widen at the sight of the attractive girl who graced his class with her presence last year.

Monika stands a few feet away, brown hair combed into long tresses flowing over her shoulders, draping over the strap of her schoolbag. Stock still, she stands and stares at the pair, her eyes fixed on the lanky figure of the main character.

A blush begins to creep over his face. "Oh, h-hi," he stammers.

"Morning, Monika!" Sayori pips.

Monika breathes in, her eyes half-closing, beautiful lips parting.

"What you said last night—" she begins. "Did you mean any of it?"

He blinks twice, blank confusion on his face.

"Eh?" Sayori starts. "Um, yeah! This is the new member I was going to bring to our club! Oh, sorry…" she pouts, turning to him. "I know—I was supposed to tell you, I wanted you to come along to our literature club!"

Monika keeps her eyes fixed on him. Her lower lip trembles.

He shies away from her gaze, turning his head awkwardly to the side. Boyishly, he jerks his eyes back to look at her.

"Hi—um, I don't think we've—" he stammers, laughing nervously. "I mean, we were in the same class last year, but I think we haven't really talked. You're Monika, right?"

Monika shakes her head. "No, stop it. Not now. Don't play games with me. Tell me—is this what you meant? That you were going to create people to fill this world?"

"Create people?" he repeats, stepping back a little.

Sayori purses her lips, her eyes wide. "Wait. Do—do you two know each other already?"

"Um, no," he answers hesitantly. "We never really said hello before. But I've heard about you, Monika. Always admired you! You were really the most popular—" he clamps his mouth shut.

"Tell me what you are doing. Tell me who—what—these people are. Stop playing the game—I want you to be honest."

"Um, Monika, I don't—I mean, I've played games, like, video games," he mutters.

Monika steps closer, her eyes narrowing, her tone steely. "Stop talking like him, pretending that you're him! Just—I want to talk to you. The real you."

He's already backing away. "Hey—hey, what's—I don't know what you're talking about!"

"Monika, what's wrong?" Sayori blurts, looking anxiously at both of them. Her eyes dart back and forth between the two, wide open. "Who's he pretending to be? What happened between you two?"

"I—I don't know, Sayori—" He's practically tripping over his dress shoes. "Um, hey, I'll catch you later, okay? I need to—um—check something. You two talk, okay? Bye!"

"Wait!" Sayori calls out.

And then he's off, striding awkwardly as fast as he can without breaking into a run.

Leaving two figures, standing still at the intersection as uniform-clad students step past and around them. One, a petite strawberry blonde-haired schoolgirl still anxiously and bewilderedly looking around. And the other, a taller svelte girl looking as stunned as if she had been struck in the face.

* * *

 _\+ connection terminated._

I don't watch anymore. I don't need to. That interaction told me enough. My plan to un-fuck the game world is about to get fucked right back up before it even starts, and unless I get to Monika and do some aggressive negotiating, I'm going to lose her. And then it doesn't matter if she fails to break the code a million times. She only needs to get it right once.

First things first.

I need a body.

I start moving quickly. Back up the street, away from the intersection. There's more than one way to the school. The main road leads straight to the school gate. But there's a side alley two blocks up that ends at a seven-foot high fence. Behind it, the school field.

What are my options?

I can recreate a body from scratch. Same as I did with the main character. Wouldn't take more than a few seconds.

No.

Twenty-five minutes ago, I wake up to my body having been hijacked—or something—and me being forcibly booted out from my corporeal form. Whatever it is, I have yet to figure it out, which means I can't risk having it happen again. I still don't know what—fragments—of my HAZE signature are left on the main character, lingering as digital residue. If it happens again, more bits could get left behind as I get evicted. Like sign-in logs, or sandbox algorithms.

Or admin keys.

Fuck. The thought itself is sickening.

Back to square one.

I need a body.

I continue to make my way towards the alley. Weaving in between lampposts and mailboxes, dodging the sight lines of salarymen entering their cars and senior citizens on bikes.

It needs to be uniquely tied to my HAZE signature, recognised by the system as incontrovertibly linked with my administrator credentials and my personal (encrypted) data. Anything tries to boot me from that, defensive firewalls kick in.

But—how can I, how can anyone, tie something like a _character_ in a game world, to something so integral to my identity?

I'm vaulting over a waist-high wooden fence into someone's backyard, as transparent as a ghost, when the answer hits.

And like all good answers, it's so simple it almost makes me cry.

* * *

There is a basic vetting procedure for all employees at ALPANU. The official line, of course, is that it's for medical and health reasons. They want to make sure that every person on the payroll is physically healthy, and don't mind being thorough about it.

The real reason, of course, is that once you undergo the procedure, they have your unique biometrics in such a way that every airport body scanner, traffic camera, and aerial drone in the world can now track you with precision. Everywhere you go, they'll know.

The procedure, of course, is a scan. Specifically, a CT/MRI scan.

It maps out your body, your soft tissue and bone, building a complete three-dimensional map of your body encoded in digital data. With the injection of contrast media, they can even map blood vessels.

My scans are uploaded to the ALPANU cloud, uniquely encrypted, and linked completely to my digital signature.

Now all I need to do is download them.

And—build.

It starts to emerge. From the inside out, wrapping around my rig, even as I grip the top of a wall and hoist my body up.

When I land on the other side, the translucent outline of a skeleton has begun to form. Coils of pixels assemble themselves into the surface of long bones. Spreading fingers of white solidify into my ribs.

As I weave past the bushes, muscles begin to pad themselves onto me. Striated blocks of fibre, with slivers of thick connective tissue and fat beginning to line their borders. I feel them collating on my face, forming the muscles that would allow me to smile, frown, and everything in between.

By the time my skin starts to form, I'm glad that I'm already in the alley. The last thing anyone needs to see is a buck naked man in broad daylight in whatever Tokyo-like city forms the game world.

As I grip the top of a nearby abandoned fridge, I notice that somehow the program has also replicated my tattoos.

Huh. I guess there's no need to worry that my nudes will leak somewhere. ALPANU already has them.

I decide quickly on a choice of clothing. Something appropriate.

A plan begins to form.

I launch myself off the top of the fridge, vaulting over the fence, completely naked.

And land on the grass, my dress shoes absorbing the impact, the mildest spray of moisture dotting my black slacks.

At the same time, I realise something. With a three-dimensional model of my throat and upper airway now integrated into my body, I can speak again. Really speak, this time with my normal voice. Like all truly brilliant solutions, this one continues to solve problems I had never even considered.

I run my fingers over the polished surface of my coat. Straighten my tie. Then I walk across the field.

I'm in the school.

Now, I just need a reason to be here.

* * *

I pause somewhere in the school, close to the teachers' room. Grab a seat, and kick back. There's no rush. School won't end for another eight hours.

And I get busy.

I reach through the code, into the undercurrent that forms the school and its environment. Exploring, understanding. There are familiar aspects, signatures and tell-tale signs. The sheer amount of data is staggering—hundreds of students, dozens of teachers, an entire sprawling building—but things get simpler when I know what I need.

I need a reason to be here.

And I know how to get it.

I get to work. Almost lazily, because I have a third of a day to do something I could do in a third of a second. So there's no reason not to be meticulous.

Soon, I'm done.

And I wait.

In the meantime, I find a mirror and check my face. It's amazing how well-integrated the script is. My features, my build, all strongly reminiscent of myself, and yet re-adjusted into the Japanese animated rendition of reality. I don't mind it, not too much. There are far bigger things to worry about.

* * *

"Ah, good evening! Not leaving yet?" A slender schoolteacher in glasses walks past, giving me a smile.

"Not just yet, Miss Masaoka." I smile in return, cradling my clipboard and stack of books. "Have some business after school, extracurricular activities with the students."

"I see!" The scent of her perfume is subtle, but noticeable. "Well, please take care. And see you tomorrow!"

"See you tomorrow, and have a safe journey home." I give her a wave, and she is on her way.

This school is full of incredibly cute teachers.

I keep walking. Through the corridors, to where I know I need to be.

And then I see her. Lingering some distance away from the classroom.

"Hello there," I call out. "Is this the Literature Club?"

Monika jumps. Whirls around, her hair flowing like an oversized paintbrush. "Oh—oh, good evening sir." She blushes.

"No 'sir' please, twenty-five isn't that old." I grin. "You're Monika, am I right? The president?"

She nods, briskly.

"Is everything alright?" I lower my voice. "You're out here in the corridor—"

"No—no, I'm fine," she answers softly. It's then that I notice the dried streaks of tears on her face. Her posture is unsteady, her hair coming loose under the bow.

Heaven knows, what's been going through her mind for the past eight hours, after what happened at the intersection.

"That's good to hear. Anyways, are your members already here?" I nod towards the classroom.

"Yes they are. Um—"

"Oh, where are my manners. My apologies." I cock my head. "There've been some new changes with the curriculum, and the school felt it would be beneficial for our extracurricular clubs to have more guidance from teachers. So, as of today, I'm your club advisor."

"Club—advisor?" Monika repeats softly.

I nod. "Yes. Don't worry, I won't interfere with anything! You all carry on, and I'll just be there if you need me."

"Oh—oh. Alright then." Monika nods, unsure.

We start walking towards the classroom, side by side.

"Hey, Monika," I say, "I'm also the guidance counsellor, and my door's always open. If you need to talk about anything at all, I'm here."

She looks at me for a moment, pausing in her step. Then offers a wan smile, barely there. "Thank you. Mr—"

"Jin," I answer. "Call me Jin."

* * *

 **Okay everyone!**

 **Um, you probably know who I am. And maybe you feel a bit weird...**

 **But that's okay! Just wanted to say, the best part about writing is hearing what other people think about your work!**

 **So, if you like this story, or if you want to say anything to help it get better, don't forget to leave a review, okay?**

 **Ahahaha~**


	6. Chapter 6: Something something anime

I had my first real teacher at thirteen years of age.

Not those soppy pencil-pushers press-ganged into government service with chalk in their hand and their backs turned to thirty-eight children they hate with all their hearts. No, my first _real_ teacher would never have been caught dead in a classroom, or anywhere that even briefly involved contact with the sprawling web of Hong Kong bureaucracy. Mainly because he was a ghost, wanted in eighteen countries, laying low in a tiny one-window room in downtown Kowloon. His skin was the colour of candlewax, anaemic and fallow, and his command of both Cantonese and English was so good that I could never really figure out his ethnicity.

My first real teacher had no name. He only had a handle: _deathrow._ When I asked, he said that was what he faced if he was ever caught. Of course, later he told me that the real reason was that it was the name of the street he was born in, in his native language.

My first teacher taught me to code. Really code, for a purpose. I still don't know why he did it. Maybe he just needed to kill time, bored out of his mind while in hiding. Maybe he wanted to pass it on, some bit of himself to a random nondescript schoolboy, never knowing when it would all end for him. Maybe he just fell prey to the tendency of every hacker to show off whenever he could.

On an old, patchwork laptop resuscitated with wires and external encrypted drives, he gave me the keys to the machine that turned the breathing wheel of the world.

My first teacher passed on to me my first real tools. In the helplessness, in the lost swirling meaningless shithole of community relief programs, he gave me what I needed to begin tearing away at my reality.

Ten years later, I find my first teacher strapped upside down to a pipe in Ciudad Juarez, his arms opened wrist-to-elbow with a machete, bled dry like a pig. Cartels had finally caught up to him. The ALPANU clean-up crew simply grab his hard drive, wipe the place clean and leave within the hour.

Eight days after that, I find the favela cunt who killed him.

A day later, I toss a wet, heavy garbage bag into an overflowing storm drain in Guadalajara.

And a day after that, I am on a flight back to Bern.

* * *

Anyways. Where was I?

Yes, teachers. My point being, my experience with teachers hasn't been the most—orthodox. Unfortunately, right now the situation calls for my ability to play a whole other kind of teacher. The dry punch-clock tie-wearing bastards who suck the energy out of a classroom like a sinkhole. This is bullshit.

I straighten my tie, button my coat, and follow Monika into the classroom.

The closest girl is at her desk, elbows resting on the wooden surface, arms tucked in. Long cascading tresses of dark hair tinged with purple tumble over her slim shoulders, reaching past her face. Through the gaps of the curtain of hair, I spot an open book.

Then her eyes turn upwards to meet mine, and Yuri straightens up like an uncoiling spring. "Oh—oh!"

"Okay everyone!" Monika perks up. "Welcome to the first meeting of the Literature Club this term!"

She turns to me, offering a polite bow, the motion causing the ribbons of her bow to dance in the air. "This is our new—club advisor, Mr Jin. He will be helping us with the club from today!"

"Don't mind me," I add, waving a hand. "I'll just be at the back if you need me."

"A teacher! We've never had a teacher in our club before!" Sayori clasps her hands together. "I hope you like our literature club!"

"I'm sure I will!" I reply cheerfully, my eyes scanning the room.

All the while, I reroute incoming data streams to my prefrontal cortex. Helps me continue to run diagnostics without breaking concentration.

Sayori beams—positively beams—and titters to the side, making way for me. I notice she hasn't actually made eye contact.

"Well—you look a little young to be a teacher." A mutter comes from my left.

I turn to lock eyes with a diminutive, slim girl. Bright pink bangs frame her dainty face, her lips locked in a pout. Her arms are folded across her modest figure, her rose-pink eyes size me up from top to bottom.

"I get that a lot." I beam at Natsuki. "You'll be surprised how often I get mistaken for a student's older brother."

While my mouth delivered trivialities, my eyes wandered over Natsuki's features. Petite, probably scraping five feet flat. Up close, I see the expertly-applied layers of makeup, and instantly realise that their purpose was not to flatter—but conceal.

Her pale skin, betraying her infrequent meals.

The reddish crusting at the side of her lips, half-covered with foundation, lines spreading just beyond the borders of vermillion. Angular cheilitis—iron and vitamin B deficiency. Malnutrition.

Something else is tugging at my attention. Something just under the current of conscious thought. Sometimes the brain picks things up before it even knows they have been sensed.

Something isn't right here. Something doesn't fit.

"Um, excuse me—" I turn my eyes back to the desk.

"Um, if I may—what do you teach? I don't think I've seen you here before…" Yuri's hands play nervously with the ends of her hair. She bites her lip as if immediately regretting speaking, sending a bloom of red to her cheeks.

"Well, I'm the guidance counsellor." I smile reassuringly. "Most of the time I'm in my office, and students come and see me whenever they have things to talk about."

"Oh," she replies simply, then falls silent.

Her finger still clutch the book in her hand, her knuckles turning pale from the tightening grip. Her fingertips press dimples into the surface of the paperback. _Portrait of Markov._

I watch Yuri's face. The way her eyes flit involuntarily, her gaze averting mine. The minor twitches in her expression, the barely-noticeable swell of colour along the side of her nose bridge. The nervous tic in her finger she is neither aware of or can control.

I notice the sleeves of her uniform, fully covering her arms. The way her fingers firmly grip the hem of her sleeves whenever she moves, lest they fall down and expose her arms.

I nod politely, and then take a seat in the back of the class.

* * *

 _Of fucking course they don't trust me._

The one flaw in my plan. I made myself an authority figure. To blend into a group of young adults who perhaps have had the most cause to distrust authority figures.

It's a step forward, maybe one backwards diagonally. The downside is how much harder it is to work my way into the dynamics of these four girls, with the addition of social and professional barriers as well. The upside—the flexibility. School personnel can move around with greater freedom, ask questions with the assumption that they would receive answers, and enjoy a general sense of deference from the student body.

Need to play my cards right, and not alienate anyone. Which means to shut up—and listen.

The second thing is the more cause for concern.

 _Where the fuck is that MC bastard?_

* * *

"Hey Sayori," Yuri chimes in, with a voice as quiet as a nightingale's song, "weren't you going to bring a friend to our club?"

"Oh." Sayori is visibly crestfallen, her shoulders slumping. "He—um, he said he'd join us next week."

I sit up just a tiny bit straighter. My expression doesn't change. But out the corner of my eyes, I watch Monika.

"He wanted to check out the anime club—" Sayori trails off, her dainty shoulders shrugging ever so slightly.

I see Monika trying her level best to keep her expression passive, but the narrowing of her eyes, flaring of her nostrils, and the ever so slight tremor of her lower lip give it all away. She blinks twice, and the moisture gathering on the corners of her eyes cling to her lashes like raindrops.

I lean back in my chair and reassess the situation.

On the one hand, Monika is now a loose cannon on deck. She was emotional enough to play havoc with the base code and take a digital sledgehammer to the columns of data making up the character files before. There's no telling what she'd do now, that she think she's either being toyed with—or worse, that I've quit the game entirely, and that she's stuck back in the hellish loop of irrevocable paths towards a generic dating sim ending. The only way to put a stop to this, is for me to make contact once again.

On the other hand, the change in situation is also a huge tactical advantage. Now, she doesn't know where I am—who I am—and what I can do. With all her attention and emotional angst fixated on that useless schoolboy, I'm free to operate at will. This is time—precious time—for me to start recompiling the code blocks she so carelessly scrambled.

So where do I go from here?

First things first, locate the guy.

I send out a ripple of code, pinging off his distinct signature. Like sonar, the script reverberates through the school in the fraction of an instant.

I see the side of Monika's eye twitch. Barely perceptible.

She feels it. She may not know what it means, but if it happens often enough, she'll start picking things up. Things that it would be problematic for her to know. I need to be cautious with my coding. Conservative.

In any case, the return signal reaches me seamlessly. The idiot is one floor down, still walking unsurely down the corridor, attempting to find whichever collection of mouth-breathers makes up the anime club.

I make the decision in an instant. It's time to close the loose ends and bring them together. One way, or another.

Under the table, I touch my index finger and thumb together.

I give Monika the faintest of smiles. Whatever she's done, whatever she thinks, she hasn't even seen the beginning of possibility for the world of coding.

* * *

He walks, down the corridor of locked classrooms and shuttered windows. Hopelessly lost, he pulls out his smartphone and curses the dying battery.

One floor down, the only light is from the sun filtered through the classroom windows and then again through the glazed glass of the outward-facing windows. The rays of light are scattered and dispersed. Just as well. Proper lighting would give things away in an instant, once the script begins to run.

It happens, in the instant of his half-step, before his foot makes contact with the ground.

In the next instant, the confused and unkempt schoolboy stands at the threshold of another classroom, in another corridor one floor up, his shirt untucked and his tie loosened. Staring, in mute surprise, at the four girls staring back at him.

* * *

I break the loop of my fingers, and sigh in satisfaction.

That was of the very first scripts I learned, compiled on some extremely illegal software.

Taught to me by a man who wrote an entire programming language based off declassified West German neurocognition projects dating back to when the Berlin Wall still stood. A potent shortcut, like the prow of an icebreaker, allowing jumps between directories that bypassed routine network securities and shortened access time from hours to seconds.

We coded together, in the sparse cramped slum-like quarters of a man with half a billion dollars he could not access. And in that time, I began to see. Outside the window, I no longer saw the world wearing its skin. Now, I saw it as it was, naked and vulnerable. Traffic lights and electronic displays running on tech forty years old. Power grids open to attack from any direction. Thousands of computers, with unsecured cameras and microphones. Bank accounts laughably exposed, like a chest of hundred-dollar bills secured with a bike lock.

Monika saw the world beyond, through the hole in her wall. My hole in the wall was the greenlit screen of a tiny, jerry-rigged computer rigged up to five external hard drives and cooled with a cheap Chinese-made standing fan.

Most teachers teach students to obey rules.

My teacher taught me to break shit.

Now to watch things fall into place.


	7. Chapter 7: Everybody, shots shots shots

"Um…um, hey…" He stutters, clutching his schoolbag by one fraying strap. "Sorry…I think I'm at the—"

I interject quickly, calling from the back of the class. "No, no. This is the right place. Come on in."

Monika starts, her body freezing mid-turn. The pen nearly falls from her fingers. Her eyes move to the doorway, lingering on the figure of the schoolboy.

Natsuki observes from her desk, biting her lip, her posture radiating caution. Yuri glances inquisitively at the newcomer, her eyes stealing quick looks at the fresh-faced boy before darting away awkwardly.

It's Sayori that gives the most enthusiastic welcome, blurting out: "Hey! You came after all!"

I take the cue.

Sometimes it's the tiniest, most subtle things that push things one way or the other. It's impossible to pick up consciously. It needs no more than five lines of code. But when I very slightly lower the ambient temperature outside in the corridor, it's enough to make him take an involuntary step inside the relative warmth of the classroom.

"Um, yeah, hi Sayori." I see his eyes flit upwards as he tries to concoct a story. "I had trouble finding my way here…so…well, I managed to figure out where you are…"

"No problem!" Sayori squeals. "Hey everyone! The new member is here!"

He mumbles under his breath. "I told you, don't call me a 'new member'…"

Yuri stands up daintily from her seat, hands clasped behind her back, and gives a little bow. "Welcome to the Literature Club. It's a pleasure meeting you." She smiles, her delicate lips folding upwards. "Sayori always says nice things about you!"

Natuski pouts, arms akimbo. "Seriously? You brought a boy? Way to kill the atmosphere."

Monika is still standing in place, eyes blinking rapidly. She's not going to pick up the cue. Which means the ball is now in my court.

"Welcome to the Literature Club!" I smile as I rise from my seat. He startles and takes a small step back—a teacher is almost definitely the last person he expected to see. "I'm Jin, and I'm your club advisor."

I thrust out my hand. After a brief pause, he takes it.

"Um, hello sir. It's a pleasure to meet you," he manages to stammer out.

 _\+ installing tunnelsnake…complete._

 _\+ login credentials verified. Warning: this software is the sole property of Q2VudHJhbCBJbnRlbGxpZ2VuY2UgQWdlbmN5 and protected by copyright law. Unlawful usage of this software is a federal offense._

"Likewise." I smile, and release my grip.

It's not as persistent or reliable as the spyware in Monika's pen. But _tunnelsnake_ creates a backdoor that lasts for an hour or so, give or take. At short range, with a stable intranet connection, I would be able to access most of the data blocks, more or less. Track usage and access history.

And figure out how the hell I was booted out of the rig I created.

"So, I guess you know Sayori?" I pivot my body sideways, angling myself towards the girl in question.

"Yeah! She's been my good friend for a long time!" His face lights up. In response, Sayori giggles demurely.

The feeling of unease is still at the back of my head. By now, I can narrow it down more or less. Nothing is wrong with the four girls, at least not that I can immediately sense. But there is a rogue signature around. Small skid marks of tampering, the tell-tale 'fist' of someone who knows what they're doing. Something that clung to one of them.

Saying that Monika looks lost would be a gross understatement. She stands stock still, shifting her weight from foot to foot. Natsuki and Yuri are beginning to throw her awkward glances, sensing the shift in atmosphere.

"Anyways, meet the rest of the club!" I pipe up. He smiles in return, and turns his eyes to Natsuki and Yuri.

At the same time, I write the code. Lines of them coming together in the breadth of a second. This cannot wait.

Monika feels it. A tug at her attention, pulling her gaze sideways, towards the whiteboard. As if her mind has been compelled to turn her attention there, moved by some irrevocable force.

Don't be ridiculous. It's nothing so dramatic as mind control or telekinesis.

Simply the addition of a soft infrasonic frequency, pandering to the remnant of the reptile brain in humanity. The low-pitched sound used to function as an alert to the threats of the wild—the growl of predators, the herald of distant storms, the tectonic shift of an earthquake—in the age before humanity domesticated itself.

Monika turns her face to the whiteboard.

Her eyes see the message. Written in the blue ink of a marker pen, but small—neatly printed as if with a typewriter.

 _Stay here after the club._

 _We will talk._

And right before her eyes, the ink fades, breaking into globules of blue that roll across the alabaster surface of the board before disappearing from sight.

Monika's eyes linger on the white for many moments.

"What are you looking at?" Natsuki mutters. "If you want to say something, say it."

"S-sorry…" he fumbles impotently.

After a brief pause, I catch the whisper from Sayori's dainty lips. "You can just ignore her when she gets moody…"

* * *

Perfect, word for word. Even the unguarded and otherwise unpredictable moments fall into place like footfalls into footprints already embedded in the soil.

How much is scripted, and how much is spontaneous?

When you've written code for a computer program, you can assure yourself of the independence of will. We're more than biological motherboards, more than tangles of equations that take input and spit output. But when you've seen code written for the human brain—seen it run, in real time—you're a lot less sure.

I watch him fumble as he exchanges pleasantries with Yuri and Natsuki. Unbelievable as it seems, I get the feeling that his interactions with three-dimensional females up to this point have been only nominal. I don't need the helpful data on skin temperature, dermal vasodilatation, or heart rate that the private network is so helpfully feeding me. He's nervous, scared out of his wits—and hopelessly horny.

* * *

I tune most of it out, and refocus on my surroundings.

He seems clean for now. And so does Monika. But the unease lingers, and I'm narrowing it down to one of the other three.

I can't very well install backdoors on all of them. I can already tell that Monika is more perceptive that I give her credit for. If I leave too many fingerprints, open too many boxes—she'll know. She's already hung-up on 'toying with lives.' She won't like finding out that I'm going full Big Brother on everyone else—her included.

On the more practical note—there is still that one disturbing, inconvenient fact.

Somebody evicted me from my rig.

Somewhere in this sprawling digital sandbox—maybe even in the mainframe—lurks a person or persons capable of circumventing the world's most secure digital encryption. Someone who could be watching. Someone who has the upper hand, and hence someone I truly do not like.

The best way forward is to watch and listen. The old fashioned way, to watch for things to open up slowly as the game starts to run. Time as a diagnostic tool.

As if on cue, the background diagnostics start to ping me. Striking gold. Familiar file names emerge. Names that make me, literally and figuratively, sit up and take notice.

Data mining keys. Fibre optic network maps. Telephone transcripts. Money trails.

It's all coming together. Broken data blocks reassembling.

It's working.

 _It's working._

It's only after I hear a tiny intake of breath that I notice something pink that has been lingering at the edge of my vision for a while. I look up to see Sayori holding a cupcake in both hands, topped with bright pink icing and dotted with flakes.

"F-for you, Mr Jin," she nervously fumbles, holding it out. "Natsuki made them herself."

I accept the frosted treat with a smile, and Sayori retreats. My mind continues to parse records and file names even as I sink my teeth into the calorie-laden dessert. A little too sweet.

"This is really good!" I hear him blurt out.

Natsuki says something snappy in return. In visual novel form, the pitch-perfect iteration of a _Tsundere_. Here, hearing it in real-time, with true pitch and inflection, it comes across as—

Rude. Reactionary.

Because now there is no ambiguity. And reality does not agree with the socially-deprived fantasies of the otaku or the writer that caters to him.

The scent of tea leaves wafts towards my nostrils. I glance to my right, and see Yuri cupping a warm ceramic mug brimming with green tea.

"For you, Mr Jin," she whispers. Involuntarily, she bites her lip, sending a flush of colour along the vermillion border.

"Thanks, Yuri." I smile, looking into her eyes. "You brewed this yourself?"

"Ah, um, yes," she stammers. "I kept the tea set in the classroom. But the teachers gave me permission, so it's not really against the rules," she blurts out hurriedly, "and I keep it really clean—"

"Don't worry," I say firmly. "It's fine."

I raise the mug to my lips, millimetres away from the warm liquid, when I feel it.

Entry.

My blood runs cold.

Nobody has access. Nobody should. This sandbox is locked away. Every network is sealed off. There should be no way to get it.

I begin to run diagnostics even as my eyes scan the room, watching Sayori interrogating the main character on his reasons for joining the club. I observe Yuri raising the mug to her lips, eyes half-closing as she imbibes the tea. I see Natsuki pout, fists clenching at some remark she must have found offensive. And I spot Monika.

Her eyes are wide. She looks out the window, her hands folded behind her back, pen clasped firmly between pale fingers.

She felt it too.

We're under attack.

I can't risk this. Not now. Not with—everything.

This is too well-timed. Too many coincidences. Too many fuck-ups. Too many unexpected wild cards. Something, or someone, is fucking with me, and I am just about out of patience.

"Sorry, excuse me." I rise to my feet. Four pairs of eyes turn to me. "I've got a call to make. You ladies carry on? Will be right back."

I don't wait to hear their murmurs of hesitant assent or flustered replies. I'm out of the door in seconds.

I wait until I am well out of sight and sound before I let loose.

Scripts launch into the deep Shell like heat-seeking missiles. Burrowing deeply into the HAZE code, sniffing out anomalous code like sharks after the smell of blood.

* * *

+ _HoundofTindalos01 active_

+ _HoundfoTindalos02 active_

+ _HoundofTindalos03 active_

+protocol: 924741642

* * *

I need to find it. This new fuck-up.

The link is tight. Proxy networks bouncing across several continents, with several dead-ends to throw me off the trail, but the tricks are five years out of date. I close in quickly on the IP addresses, hunting down the next footprint in the trail.

 _Nizhny Novgorod._

 _Warsaw._

 _Santa Monica._

 _Darlington._

 _Nantes._

 _Irving._

And then, recognition.

The last stop. Signal origin.

Irving, Texas.

The script does the rest. Narrowing down the geographical location, using the network against itself. Running code upstream, pinging off cell networks.

But I'm halfway down the corridor when one of the eighty billion lines of code jumps out at me like a bright red gunshot wound.

A HAZE handle.

Oh fuck.

The attacker is using QUBIT. Or a derivative thereof.

They are not somewhere out there trying to hack into the sandbox.

They're here. In the game world.

I break into a run.

Where? _Where?_

I reverse the flow of code. Back into the world of Doki Doki Literature Club.

The script sharks swim back into familiar waters, now roaming through the game world, invisible beneath the sub-realistic layer of the HAZE subroutines. Spreading out, finding the intrusion. I briefly wonder if they'd be seen. Likely, anyone who cares to look—and stares hard enough—would see the fast-moving code blocks as shimmers in the air. Summer mirages, nothing more.

I feel the circle closing. The scent is leading back closer. Away from the city centre, from the busy highways.

It's the school.

I reach the stairwell and hurry down, my tie loosening around my collar as it bounces with each step.

What's on the other end?

Irving, Texas. A city zone. Then a block. Then a building. Then a floor.

What else?

Online signature. Browser history. Social media profile.

No recent activity. Browser stuffed with porn. Mostly vanilla. Cleared cache—

Online purchases. Fertiliser. Surplus gardening supplies.

HAZE stability—questionable. Sharp edges to the code. This guy is running counterfeit software. A risky endeavour, not to mention stupid. Jacking into QUBIT without genuine ALPANU-vetted software risks more than just a cease-and-desist letter. One flutter in the code—you're going into an epileptic seizure.

I'm building a picture. Young male. High school to college age. Way too young to have come up with all this on his own—software is too sophisticated for the amateur shit he's pulling. Failing to cover his tracks well. Taking shortcuts. And more importantly, trying to break in from his home address.

What's this guy trying to do?

 _And where the fuck is he?_

Inside the school. A school of 1300 students. He could be anywhere.

Wait. Official hours have ended. This is extra-curricular time. That means only about a fourth of the population would be here. Clustered in their various clubs.

I'll need to look for the loners.

Data continues to flow. More information about the intruder. A yearbook photograph, something definitive. White, average height. Slim build. Grade reports. Somewhere in the bottom quartile.

A significant amount of traffic through an encrypted forum.

Posts.

 _A woman always lies and always manipulates. That's not a moral criticism, it's an evolutionary trait. The adaptation towards a stronger, faster, more physically durable counterpart—the male. Sexual dimorphism. They needed to be able to lie and cheat enough to secure a mate and ensure their own survival. Now they do it in order to gain sexual pleasure or monetary reward._

 _Frankly, I'm sick of it. I see it all around me in my school and it's fucking disgusting. We need to be aware of our own evolution. 60 000 years is more than enough time. It's time we take charge._

Oh, for fuck sakes.

It's one of those.

The anonymity of the internet allows for companionship. Any viewpoint, no matter how depraved, can collect its own community of believers and proselytes. The confused and frustrated aimless tension of teenage life can then be weaponised into something more viscous and toxic.

I skip past the thousands of other obsessive posts. It's not the content—it's the volume. He's spending upwards of twelve hours a day on this forum. Likely skipping school—and failing classes.

 _Today one of the females asked me if I knew how much I creeped out the people around me. The content of my conversations, the way I don't react in the way that neurotypicals do. More importantly, it's the fact that I see straight through the threadbare manipulation that the other Neanderthals have snared around their necks._

 _Women will spread their legs for everything and anything, because it's a commodity that never runs out. At the same time, value depreciates with each passing year, and a little bit with each transaction. Pussy will only get you so far. And it will get you nowhere with someone like me._

 _I simply stared her down until she backed away. The pre-set prey response to the predator. Evolution doing its work again._

 _One of these days, I'll have to send a message._

 _On another note, has anyone found a good way to prevent hearing damage from loud noises in close quarters? I am concerned especially about cochlear damage, and eardrum rupture. Especially if I pre-morbidly suffer from an anxiety disorder._

Loud noises in close quarters—

 _I've just about mapped it out. I'm not saying any more. Just that it's taken me much less time than I need. I can thank my eidetic memory for that._

 _I cannot believe how amazingly detailed and breathtakingly advanced this is. I cannot reveal my source. Only that this is a true gift, and the fact that it has arrived on my doorstep shows that someone out there believes as strongly as I do. This tool will transform everything. It will give me the ability to do what I was always meant to do._

 _Practice makes perfect. I can plan for every eventuality. Run through scenarios as many times as I can. Right now, I suppose I can achieve anywhere from thirty to forty percent targets hit within the range of the SWAT response time._

 _Look to the skies. To the radio and news._

 _Watch for my sign._

 _Know me._

This sick fuck is in the school now.

Oh shit.

It all comes together. Millions of data blocks, connections forming in my mind. Drawing together disparate data to form a conclusion.

One that chills me to the bone.

 _Practice makes perfect._

It's no coincidence, the fact that this intrusion into the HAZE network went through against all odds and all countermeasures, almost as if he was handed the keys. It's no coincidence that eleven days prior to this, he had made three separate purchases on three different websites using false names and addresses.

He's close. I can sense him, almost as if his heartbeat was an audible noise in the air. My body is coiled and tense, like a spring, slipping into conditioning as easily as if it were second nature.

He's an amateur. He won't know how to jack the HAZE undercurrent. He'll be confined to a physical location.

I can reach him.

By now, the script hounds are lurking close to his location. In passive mode, doing little else other than surveillance. Feeding my information—audio.

"—then, head down the hallways towards the cafeteria. Maximum effect."

His voice. I hear it, the first physical confirmation that the target of my pursuit is real. Thin, reedy, nasal. Shaky with anticipation, or fear, or glee.

Classroom 8C. Thirty eight meters away. I creep along the floor, feet rising and falling deliberately. I concoct a quick line of code to mask my footsteps. And another flurry of code, spreading into the classroom like sonar—

Fuck.

He is standing in the middle of the classroom, with chairs and tables cleared away and stacked neatly at the back. Behind him, kneeling on the floor, are three figures. One male, two females.

"Please—come on, let us go—" a shaky, tearful female voice—

"Now will you shut the fuck up? I am trying to plan," he answers, taking a step towards the girl. She recoils. "Honestly, I appreciate the realistic AI, but right now it's more about the procedure of it all…"

Hostages.

The whole purpose for this incursion, it becomes clear, even before I track his straw purchases, before I sift through his refuse pile of notes and ramblings. This is practice.

Whatever he's going to do here, he plans to do out there.

The code continues to run, feeding back details about the environment. He is dressed in a plain white shirt, with black slacks. A school uniform. Short hair. Glasses. Two pens in his pocket. And—

Oh fuck.

It's not possible. It would never run in HAZE. The German algorithm was specifically designed with countermeasures to prevent this, to prevent the urban simulation from being used for anything other than peaceful civilian utility. More precisely, it was designed to be unable to be modified for combat or military use.

Meaning that no firearms would ever be able to be ported into HAZE. Doing so would trigger a massive system-wide alert, shutting down all inbound and outbound communications and locking everyone out immediately.

And yet there it is.

Coated in polymer, with a tan finish, the shape of a Walther P99 semi-automatic pistol, resting in the trembling hands of a high school student.

 _It's all about equality. The brute force of a Neanderthal reigned supreme until ingenuity brought us level with them. And today, that same ingenuity is manifest in the modern firearm._

 _I have just purchased that firearm, and two others._

This fucking psychopath is planning to kill.

And then I hear it. Feel it, rather.

Monika.

She's moving too. She's here.

My chest tightens as if caught in the jaws of a bear trap.

What the fuck?

Why isn't she in the classroom? Why the fuck is she down here?

Shit. The answer is obvious.

 _She felt that glitch in the code._

 _She thinks that's me._

 _She's running right towards him._

If it was possible to sprint at double full-speed, I did right there and then. My abdominals screaming in pain, my lungs shivering with the impossible demand for oxygen. HAZE replicates everything flawlessly. Humanly.

I see Monika running. Pausing, in front of the classroom. And her hand resting on the doorknob. Turning.

I see him turn towards the noise. See the muzzle of the weapon swivel towards this young schoolgirl.

I see the end. In a world HAZE has breathed life into—death, death is all too real.

Something pings.

+ _HoundofTindalos02 active. Pending command…please respond._

One of the script constructs, the quickly constructed hunters I sent out. It's inside the classroom. Skulking out of sight, barely visible. A miasma of unsorted code and pending commands.

What can I do with it?

Of course.

A way in. Fast, faster than even Monika can manage.

I run the code.

In an instant, I'm no longer real. Just—pieces. Shattered fragments.

I feel the tunnel between us both in the HAZE undercurrent. Pulling fragments of my rig, dismantling the shards that make up the script hound. Happening in the barest slimmer of a second, the hound coming undone as script runs smoothly to replace its body with my own person.

I feel myself becoming real again. Assembling myself. My vision returning. Sound coming back as if emerging from underwater.

I'm in the classroom. Behind him, behind this jittery kid holding in his hands a weapon of destruction. I look quickly to my left—and meet the tear-stained bloodshot eyes of a terrified schoolgirl, crouched on the floor, staring uncomprehendingly at the sight of a grown man having just materialised in thin air.

Fuck.

And then it happens.

Monika gently opens the door.

I sprint. My legs move, too slow, too cumbersome, but I move all the same. And he must have heard it, because I see the pistol move. Away from the doorway, away from Monika's figure coming through the half open door. Swinging in an arc as his body turns, towards me.

I catch Monika's eyes. Her eyes are all I can see, obscured behind the door as she opens it, as she freezes in disbelief at the scene before her. Obscured by the body of the boy barely ten feet from me.

Obscured by the muzzle flashes, as I feel the sickening impact of eight high-velocity shots slam into my body.

As I feel my legs give way, my ears register the sound of Monika's high-pitched wail.


End file.
